NAOMI KLEIN NEWSLETTER #1, THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

What’s at stake: Klein describes
a planetary crisis, measured by the rising amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, the
increasing global temperature, consequent weather extremes, melting ice, rising
oceans, and more forest fires. Meanwhile, our society continues its
business as usual, suicidal complacency, and the US GOP-controlled Senate even
seeks to ban a major possible remedy--carbon tax/fee. One of the few
groups not complacent is ours, but we can amplify our voice, and one way is
through Naomi Klein’s This Changes
Everything.

A nation that continues
year after year to spend more money on economic growth through advertising
unnecessary commodities and on imperial domination than on programs of social
uplift is approaching spiritual doom. -- A modification of a comment by
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Gar Alperovitz, “The
Political-Economic Foundations of a Sustainable System”
Ladha and Kirk, “Capitalism Is Just a Story,” Essay and Film
Venus Project Documentary Series: “The Choice Is Ours”
Kai Wright on MLK,JR’s Legacy

PART I

OUTLINE OF THE BOOK

DICK’S ANALYSIS OF
KLEIN’S INTRODUCTION

Introduction of
Introduction

A. The
Climate Crisis

B. Denial
p. 3

C. Reality:
Threat and Opportunity 4

D. Opportunities
and Hope 5

E. Signs
of Change, Statement of Purpose
7-8

This
final paragraph (E.) declares her deepest, comprehensive purpose and
subject: to bring together all aspects of the crisis into one “coherent
narrative” to generate a mass movement “to protect humanity from the ravages of
both a savagely unjust economic system and a destabilized climate system.”

I. A
PEOPLE’S SHOCK pp. 8-15

A. Recent
history of crises/shocks, corporate social/econ. control, and
exploitation to enrich the 1%. Example: Raytheon (p. 9). Privatization
of the Commons.

B. Solution
anticipated: soc. and econ. transformations by and for all (9-10). Ex.:
Democrats’ New Deal (10). [See Kaye’s The Fight for the Four
Freedoms].

C. (21).
Now not only dereg. capitalism but capitalism itself (grow or die) is the
catastrophe, and wealthy countries must cut 8-10% / year if world is to avoid a
“brutal crash.” We could have and still can contract our economy without
chaos, but the true believers in dereg. free-market capitalism have blocked all
efforts.

D. Our
choice (22-23): capitalism or planet, civilization destroyed or new economic
order. Another obstacle: cautious centrism. We radical
thinking and actions. And we must act quickly. By 2017 the 2
degrees door will be closed.

III. POWER,
NOT JUST ENERGY (24-25)

All
the new technologies help little if social and political leaders and
institutions support capitalism and carbon. So we must fight the
established, big roadblocks. The is means we must engage in power
politics, esp. to help build a people’s force. We must dig the
foundations—not only of capitalism but “extractivism” itself.
Climate change is the issue telling us to change
our economic system entirely, and build “a new way of sharing
this planet.” [Because it so emphatically urges us to concentrate on the
most crucial questions, this is one of the most important sections of the
Intro. Just a few years ago we were talking about our personal
resiliencies: one person rode a bike, another hung out laundry. Klein asks
us to focus our minds on what might save us.]]

IV. COMING
OUT OF DENIAL (25-26)

Continues
IV. We must fight the ideological roadblocks of market fundamentalism and
engage in political struggle for a mass movement for change at the roots from
corporations to communities. [Her tactic here is a high level of
generality. She is talking about political Parties, Democrats and
Republicans, Repubs the Party of unregulated capital accumulation, Dems once
the Party of New Deal affirmative government (pp. 453-4), now feckless.
See John MacArthur, The Outrageous Barriers…. and Kaye, The
Fight….]

V. [Untitled.
Mine: Will he ever see a moose? Will she ever see a bat? A
starfish?] (26-28).

Klein’s
hope returns to p. 7: We are recognizing the magnitude and urgency of
climate change--the crisis of all crises that changes everything--; we can
transform fear into a vision of a better, kinder future; and we still have a
brief time within our power.

Books
and Articles Cited:

Foster
and Clark, “Crossing the River of Fire.” Monthly Review (Feb.
2015)

Kaye,
Harvey. The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the
Greatest Generation Truly Great. Simon and Schuster, 2014.

Related:

Speth,
James Gustav. The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism,
the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Yale
UP, 2008. “…most environmental deterioration is a result of systemic
failures of the capitalism we have today” (9).

End
Klein’s Introduction.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING, CHAPTER BY CHAPTER ANALYSIS by Dick Bennett

PART ONE:
BAD TIMING

Chapter. 1, “The Right
Is Right: The Revolutionary Power of Climate Change” 31- (Notes 470-)

Introduction:
Denialists [The chapters do not open with a sub-heading, implying
that the opening section applies directly to the chapter title. This is
not always immediately clear because each chapter opens with a concrete
example.]

A.Heartland
Institute. Success of right wing campaign to convince people that warming is not anthropocentric, that climate
change is a fraudulent attack upon capitalism, and cc is a conspiracy to
destroy the American Way.

B. Success of right-wing propaganda
institutions and division between liberal Democrats and increasingly
reactionary r-w GOP (35-). R-w success especially during the four years
2007-2011. But then some return to reality and truth among the Democrats
as the evidence grew mountainous (75% Dems believe cc anthropogenic, one poll
showed 20% Repubs).

C.P. 36 Deeper cause
of false choice is cultural, in many of populace entrenched ignorance.

F.“Plan B: Get Rich Off
a Warming World”: Demographics of
climate change: the rich, the patriarchy are preparing to protect themselves
(adaptation a great principle if you are rich (48), in the heartless Heartland
Institute “an utter absence of empathy for the victims of climate
change”). 48-52, anticipation: We must
change our capitalist system because of how it has demonstrably harmed the
planet and its species and will continue even more callously and brutally.

H.“Coddling
Conservatives”: Catastrophic failure of
governments to start cutting emissions when “scientific consensus solidified”
in the 1980s, specifically the failure of the first World conference on the
Changing Atmosphere in Toronto in 1988.
Rise of r-w dominance. Now we
experience “ongoing and collective carbon profligacy” (56).

I.How talk to the
r-w? By framing messages not or less
frightening, finding middle ways, compromises, euphemisms? But big green groups have tried that, and it
didn’t work: “opposition to climate action has only hardened,” temperature has
only risen. Furthermore, it has only
reinforced the “warped values fueling both disaster denialism and disaster
capitalism.” (58).

J.“The Battle of
Worldviews”: Alternative sub-titles of
the book are Greed over Cooperation, or Corporate-Pentagon-White House-Congressional-Corp.
Media Complex or Science, but economics/capitalism is the engine. We should choose anti-capitalist values and
practices, and many have, but not enough fast enough. Why? (61).
The complex explanation will come in the book, but at this point is
essential to acknowledge that denial, greed, the extreme free-market ideology
won At least for now, but we can hope
for empathy, compassion, generosity, solidarity eventually to return and
prevail, as Rebecca Solnit celebrates in A
Paradise Built in Hell. But first we
need to understand the origins and legacy of market fundamentalism as explained
in chaps. 2-5.

A. Trade trumps sustainability.
Anti-protections doctrine used to demolish efforts to transition from coal to
solar: Ontario’s solar industry. Ontario used feed-in tariff and local
workers and materials to build largest solar industry in Canada. Until trade and profit trumped climate control when the WTO ruled
v. local.

B. Quick history of rise of climate defense
movement from 1992 first United Nations Earth Summit in Rio and the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the intensification of the
war against climate. (Of the countless
benefits to the world provided by the UN, this 1992 Summit began perhaps the
greatest: making people aware of the science of climate change.) But that same year Pres. Clinton signed the
North American Free Trade Agreement, and in 1994 the World Trade Organization
(WT0) was established. And then the
UN-sponsored Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997, which the UA refused to sign.

A. Germany’s renewable energy transition,
reversal of neo-liberal econ. Of ‘90s when cities sold public services to
corporations.

B.Boulder, CO (see Ch. 2 on Ontario)

These
2 examples refute one of the “core ideological pillars of the free market
era”—that private services are superior to public. Strong defense of
affirmative government.

C. Hope 101: Jacobson and Delucchi, WE Can
“rapidly switch our energy systems to 100 percent renewables.” Jacobson’s
plans for all states 102. Costly but no more that the Apollo
space flight or the interstate highways. We can choose our New Deal.

Great possibilities in
Obama’s/Dems ’08 victory, decisive Dem mandate for New Deal values and adding
climate change action. O. could have won a transformative $800
billion stimulus.

B. 124 O’s Failure

He failed to control
banks and autos, public transit, etc. Why? He also gripped by old
ideological opposition to big gov’t. planning while subsidizing big private
free market corporations. I.e., O. a Dem/Republican.

C. 125 Klein’s practical political
Solution: O/Dems should have copied Repub. focus on economic basis of
their platform. O/Dems shld have campaigned on econ advantages of
comprehensive government planning, not merely reforms of harnessing the market,
but radical, fundamental change necessary, and public ready.

2011 conference on
geoengineering sponsored by UK’s Royal Society, Environmental Defense Fund, and
World Academy of Sciences. The conf. focused on the pros and cons of
sun-blocking, mainly on Solar Radiation Management (SRM). “…a grim
picture emerges” of a cure possibl y worse than the disease. I won’t
outline her discussion, but these three succinct passages deserve emphasis:

1. The true solutions succinctly listed p.
283-284 offer a summary of her position against free market rules at this point
(my rewording):

a.Public funding should go to rapid transition to
renewables.

b. Corporations responsible for climate
change should be taxed and the money spent “to clean up their mess.”

c. Energy production and grids should be in
public hands.

d. Shiva’s agro-ecological carbon
sequestration methods should be considered (284).

Section 1, “Welcome to Blockadia”(term first coined Texas in 2012, p. 302) 294- Increasing
pockets of resistance, uncoordinated local uprisings against “real climate
crimes in progress” by extraction industries.
Example: Canadian mining company Eldorado Gold in Greece. (Recent Ark. examples: rapid intro. and
expansion of destructive fracking, construction of new coal plant commenced
without permit.). Greece became militarized when both the
corporate bullies and local villages in Greece set up checkpoints and
blockades. And all around the world,
including Romania, Canada, the UK, the Russian arctic, China, Australia,
US. Summary 303-4, “core principle”:
“stop digging” and turn to renewables. [?see
Lester Brown’s The Great Transition
2015.]

Section 2, “Operation Climate Change”:Resistance to the exploitation of Nigeria by Shell Oil and the
Nigerian dictator, at first nonviolent, now an armed insurgency. Alliance of Nigerian and Equadorian
resistance, Oilwatch International. Long
history in US, e.g. Earth First! In 1980s.

Section 3, “All in the Sacrifice Zone”:Indifference in US and
Can. by most to devastating pillage amounting to ecocide suffered by those in
the zones: Alberta tar sands, US Keystone XL..
US = Saudi America. Republicans
esp.: drill everywhere. Rising but
feeble resistance in US. With climate
change, we’re all in the plunder zone.

Section 7, “The return of Precaution” 335-, the “precautionary principle”
becoming fighting foundation against the exploiting industries and the Big
Green groups in their pay. Final
paragraph’s rousing words, “The climate movement has found its nonnegotiables.”

[Two main ways of organizing an argument are 1) logical (you can diagram
it, J.S. Mill’s “On Nature”) and 2) accretive (repeating theme(s) while adding
new materials, Matthew Arnold’s Culture
and Anarchy). Klein chooses to open
with two main examples of public resistance in her first 2 chapters, then
section 3 on plunder/sacrifice (think of
the implications of her choice of “sacrifice”) zones, section 4 back to
resistance, sections 5 and 6 more criminals and criminal disasters, and section
7 resistance embracing the unifying precautionary principle. A simple structure: resistance, plunder,
resistance, plunder, resistance, with both themes present in all sections, and
some progression in this history in that the plunder is becoming worse (more
extreme extractions) and better (precautionary rock).]

A “Love and Water” (344-). I want to extract this passage for all who
seek to protect our water, among them here in NWA: Amy, Barbara, Jacqueline, Joyce and Jay, Judi
and Ellis, Lauren and Aubrey..

“When these very different worlds collide [extractive industry and home
places]. . . . .many of the people waging the fiercest anti-extraction battles
are. . . . determined to defend a richness that our economy has not figured out
how to count.” A Romanian villager is quoted:
“’Maybe we don’t have money, but we have clean water and are healthy. .
. .’ So often these battles seem to
come to this stark choice: water vs. gas.
Water vs. oil. Water vs. coal. In fact, what has emerged in the movement
against extreme extraction is less an anti-fossil fuels movement than a
pro-water movement.” (344-).

B. “Early Wins” There have been victories against fossil fuel
extraction”—“the wave of global victories against coal,” for example, some
advances in China, the millions of “unsung carbon keepers.” But they “receive almost no media attention”
(and see the corporate victories 75-).

C. “Fossil Free: the Divestment Movement,” is increasingly influential
using a portfolio of arguments. The
“eventual goal is to confer on oil companies the same status as tobacco
companies” and to develop a large popular protest movement. Signs of progress: the new Sierra Club, Shell’s declining
profits in 2014.

D.“Beyond Fossilized Democracies.”
We must build a massive pro-democracy movement, “turning Blockadia” into
a massive grassroots movement for the “right to have a say in critical
decisions relating to water, land, and air.”
This is a “global democratic crisis” (363). Many countries and cities are
“post-democratic,” but there is Blockadia.
1) human rights traditions and laws, 2) treaties: Indigenous legal
challenges, historical debts, 2) direct action, 3) movements.

Chap. 11, “You and What
Army? Indigenous Rights and the Power of
Keeping Our Word.” 367-

Canadian First Nations way of compelling reform “of powerful forces” of
government, industry, police, media, and violence: Arthur Manuel, Neskonlith, economic muscle,
“the power to enforce their rights” established by treaties: “an army of sorts
is beginning to coalesce.”

“Honour the Treaties”: Growth of First Nations consciousness of rights,
of laws and courts, direct action, alliances, mass movements. As in chap. 10, power of need for and love of
water. Idle No More movement. Paying off Canada’s debt to Indigenous P is
also blocking “:endless extraction and destruction” (383). Role of music: Neil Young’s “Honour the Treaties” Tour.

“The Moral Imperative of Economic Alternatives”: Why more First Nations are not fighting the
corporations, a highly complex situation.

Chap. 12, “Sharing the
Sky: The Atmospheric Commons and the Power of Paying Our Debts” 388-.

“The Sun Comes Out” 393: Red Cloud
training Cheyenne to build solar collectors potentially “an army of solar
warriors” in a human justice fight vs. steam engine and human desire for total
control for profit. Since corporations
create poverty which they then exploit, resistance to be successful must
combine 1) NO fossil fuels and 2) alternatives providing jobs and social safety
net. I.e., enviro movement must be
political, for example must persuade governments (referring to Canada) to
require “a minimal national carbon tax
of $10 a ton” to match pipeline investment (400). (OMNI has a committee working with Climate
Change Lobby (CCL) to promote carbon fee with dividend. Unfortunately, the US Senate recently voted a
ban on any carbon tax, giving the Republican budget authority to prohibit
federal taxation of carbon emissions from source such as coal. Both of Ark’s Senators voted for it. ADG 3-29-15.
Also, a recent panel at the
UofA Law School composed of a rep. of industry, a rep. of the ADEQ, and a rep
of the Sierra Club passed over the fee/dividend without mention. When asked why, the Sierra Club rep. Glenn
Hooks, said it had no chance.)

“Don’t Just Divest, Reinvest” 401: Klein reminds us explicitly we are
still in Part Three all about Blockadia.
The divesting from fossil fuels movement is extremely important but it
must be combined with reinvestment in the “clean tech sector”—“Divest-Invest.” Rejection of dirty energy will never succeed
without providing “economic alternatives”—Keystone XL example 403. But resistance/alternatives complicated: pp.
404-05 up against the “fossil fuels runaway train.” Needed: an inverted shock doctrine for
ecologists.

“From Local to Global Debts” 408: Shift attention to the global South,
e.g. Yasuni in Equador. 410: Throughout
her book Klein inserts reminders of significant moments from the past, here the
1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change ratified by 195 countries
including the US. (This leads me to imagine the book organized differently, beginning
with this paragraph, the remainder and rearranging the contents to show how the
Convention, seeking justice in an unequal world, was fulfilled or violated.)
411: returns explicitly to chapter 1, the right understands, but it’s been
implicit throughout.

Tipping the Balance” 413, Blockadia methods vs. “endless growth and dirty
fuels” apply to N and S esp. alternatives that eschew toxic extraction but
provide living standards. Tariff needed
for international fund for reparations “to support clean energy transitions
throughout the developing world.”

Chap. 13, “The Right to
Regenerate: Moving from Extraction to Renewal” 419-

Klein’s personal life fertility crisis in the midst of the climate crisis
related to strengthening of her
“worldview based on regeneration and renewal rather than domination and
depletion.”

“Disappearing Babies in a Warming World” 434: Species dying, “No corpses,
just an absence.”

“Fallow Time” 436: Klein’s
personal story and the planet’s story.
Restoration at the Land Institute, Salinas, contrasted to negative
influences of industrial agriculture.
Her son conceived, salmon disappearing, and the story of regeneration.

“Coming Back to Life” 442: US capitalist extractivism vs. regenerative
preserving and safeguarding life, of which Blockadia in all its manifestations
is part. (Some tension here—between the
need and right to reproduce by species vs the need to constrain human
overpopulation and consumption.). ( P.
447: A page where her avoidance of analysis of the mechanisms of capitalism
becomes obvious by her succinct analysis of one aspect: “capitalism’s drift
toward monopoly and duopoly in virtually every arena.” Klein’s book is great for its coverage of the
destructive consequences of capitalism, esp. in the US. For analysis of the processes of capitalism,
of course read Marx’s Capital, or the
application to climate, What Every
Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism by Fred Magdoff and John
Bellamy Foster (2011). (Why Klein, a
brave explicator and opponent of capitalism’s harms, doesn’t reference the
Marxist thinkers is part of the uncritical history of recent US political
economics.) P. 448, final page of Part
Three: Birth of her son and
hatcheries. (I’ll end with questions
like the one preceding: Not only why
does she not mention the benign, productive government hatchery system or teach
her son to admire affirmative
government? Is she a Libertarian or
afraid of Libertarians?)

“Conclusion: The Leap
Years, Just Enough Time for Impossible”
449

458: Yes, MORE OR LESS, the Earth,
the climate, the planet’s species, the civilizations will be decimated by
climate change…..LESS IF the people rise up in massive resistance to the harms
of capitalism by direct action: “ protests, blockades and sabotage” and by
“mass uprisings of people” like the abolition and civil rights movements (plus
all the other manifestations of hopeful Blockadia). The movement in her argument and in her
book’s title suggests this hope: On p. 43 CLIMATE CHANGE changes everything; on
p. 450 Blockadia, esp. MASS RESISTANCE, could change everything. (P. 450 is another of many pages that could
have been the opening of a different first chapter in a differently designed
book. A logical structure then would
have been: Thesis. I. More destruction if business as usual,
free market capitalism continues. A. 1.2.3.
etc. B. 1.2. etc. II. Less if massive uprisings. A. Within System. 1. 2.
etc. B. Nonviolent Direct Action. 1. 2. etc.
But Klein chose to tell stories within her own research and personal
story and thereby to accumulate by accretion a case against climate change that
has happened and is happening, and a case for resistance that is just beginning
and is lethally late but which might save us from the worst.) The remainder of the Conclusion gives
examples of resistance/Blockadia. A
Marshall Plan for the Earth is properly supported (add the money of the Apollo
Space Mission). (I was sorry FDR’s New
Deal was mentioned only three times, and sorrier the UN was so meagerly cited,
when it alone possesses the expertise and potentially the power to accomplish
all Klein hopes for; and really sorrowful she fails to confront the expense of
US wars and empire, which had it been converted into a global Marshall
Plan/Apollo Mission starting in 1992 with the UN Framework Convention on
Climate Change to combatting C02 and consequent warming could have blockaded
the worst .)

“The Unfinished Business of Liberation” 458 We already have successful models from the
past providing a vision for the future (New Deal, Marshall Plan). Now we must acquire the “massive global
investments required. . .to adapt humanely and equitably to the heavy weather
we have already locked in, and to avert the truly catastrophic warming we can
still avoid . . . .” The climate
movement is finding its moral voice.

“Suddenly, Everyone” 464: We are
seeing national “upwellings” of “transformational change” when “new structures”
are built “in the rubble of neoliberalism.”
Many of the old barriers to change (free-market ideology, magical
thinking) are being discredited.
Awareness is growing “that if change is to take place it will only be
because leadership bubbled up from below.”
We must be ready for the next moment in time when “the impossible seems
suddenly possible.”

The most important book
yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock
Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis
challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time,
restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems.

In short, either we embrace radical change ourselves or radical changes will be
visited upon our physical world. The status quo is no longer an option.

In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate
change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health
care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already
failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively
reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce
gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted
local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change
deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic
defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates
precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but
will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and
ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster
capitalism.

Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another
that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be
viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform
broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical
wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this
process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil
fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right
now.

Can we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is certain. Nothing except that
climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of
that change is still up to us.

- See more at: http://books.simonandschuster.com/This-Changes-Everything/Naomi-Klein/9781451697384#sthash.fAeYvbrp.dpuf

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With
William Morris in 1883 and Naomi Klein in 2014 we must ourselves “cross the
river of fire” to become critics of capitalism and rescuers of
civilization. We must rebuild, not on basis of capital accumulation
and growth, eventual monopoly by the few, and consequent alienation by the many,
but on principles of caring for others and well-being for all, a “ferocious
love” for all life. To accomplish this vision, because the human conquest
of nature, led by the US, endangers human survival, the world must be changed
systematically. So let our slogans be: SYSTEM CHANGE NOT CLIMATE CHANGE
and PUBLIC GOOD NOT PRIVATE PROFIT.

The Global Climateric (2- 8)

Since
it is too late for effective reforms of the capitalist system, which caused the
catastrophe, and to achieve zero emissions of fossil fuels quickly, only “real
revolutionary ecological change, unleashing the full power of organized and
rebellious humanity” will save us. Our economy is at war with
life because its fundamental drive is growth and capital accumulation.
(4) And this drive runs on fossil fuels. We must now strive to break
the carbon budget, realizing the struggle must be comprehensive revolution and
will be expensive (5), such as during WWII’s production [and Marshall Plan,
Apollo]. But such a revolution can produce a society of equality
and community, one which meets needs of people not wants of the 1%, and not
necessarily austerity (=neo-cons), but only a lower GDP (p. 6 while increasing
quality of life). How can we create such a mass
movement? There are hopeful signs—e.g. Blockadia; and wealthy countries,
mainly responsible, can afford the change; Seattle 1999; Occupy WS 2011.
Soviet societies with their high carbon omissions not the model.
Hope: “Just enough time for the impossible.”
Impossible? We don’t want the dystopia certainly ahead under
capitalism: “unending, cumulative, climate catastrophe, threatening
civilization and countless species, including our own.” (8).

Liberal Critics as Gatekeepers (8-14)

Foster
and Clark challenge eight reviewers ranging from those who think she simply
made a typo in her subtitle, Capitalism vs. the Climate, to
those who blame all environmentalists for not recognizing our rescue through
technological innovations. See my note on “Liberal” below.

Ultimate Line of Defense (15-16)

Socialist
critics of the book criticize thinness of her analysis of “the nature of system
change,” of the working class, and other aspects of socialism, but F&C
defend her “silences.” Her aim is to make “the broad case for
System change Not Climate Change.” Capitalism threatens “our survival as
a species” and “our welfare as individual human beings. Hence, we need to
build society anew. . . .” Millions of people are crossing the
river of fire, “demanding anti-capitalist or post capitalist solutions,” and
she “sees herself merely as the people’s megaphone….” (15). Her vision
is one of human community, fellowship on earth, equality, and she would—and
have us all--seize the opportunity.

Dick, 2 notes:

Capitalism system: F & C mention the liabilities of capitalism in places here and
there. Central principle: capital accumulation. Through
growth. During the last 100 years through fossil fuels. Leading to
monopoly. Involving immense waste, for example of nature and by
advertising.

Liberal: Republican, Tea Party, Right Wing critics are not discussed
because we know where they stand. But criticism from known liberals
(admirers of the New Deal, advocates of regulation and affirmative government
in general) had to be answered. (I was put off by F&C’s
title “Liberal Attack,” since “liberal” is both a complex word possessing many
meanings (by Kaye: freedom and equality and democracy, the “four freedoms”) and
the object of unremitting, ferocious attack by the Republicans and far
right. I immediately thought they meant and should have used the term
“neo-liberal” or “conservative.” But by the end of the essay I
understood.) On p. 11 particularly in her analysis of Rob Nixon’s review,
because she demands zero fossil fuels, both “liberal” and “neoliberal” (extreme
capitalism) must be rejected, just as must be extractionism and extreme
extractionism. See final par. of Liberal Critics p. 15.

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the
University of Oregon. Brett Clark is associate professor of sociology at the
University of Utah and co-author of The Tragedy of the Commodity (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming).

The front cover of Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything, is designed to look like a
protest sign. It consists of the title alone in big block letters, with the
emphasis on Changes. Both the author’s name and
the subtitle are absent. It is only when we look at the spine of the book, turn
it over, or open it to the title page that we see it is written by North
America’s leading left climate intellectual-activist and that the subtitle
is Capitalism vs. the Climate.1 All of which is clearly meant to convey
in no uncertain terms that climate change literally changes everything for today’s society. It
threatens to turn the mythical human conquest of nature on its head,
endangering present-day civilization and throwing doubt on the long-term
survival of Homo sapiens.

The source of this closing circle is not the planet, which
operates according to natural laws, but rather the economic and social system
in which we live, which treats natural limits as mere barriers to surmount. It
is now doing so on a planetary scale, destroying in the process the earth as a
place of human habitation. Hence, the change that Klein is most concerned with,
and to which her book points, is not climate change itself, but the radical
social transformation that must be carried out in order to combat it. We as a
species will either radically change the material conditions of our existence
or they will be changed far more drastically for us. Klein argues in effect for
System Change Not Climate Change—the name adopted by the current ecosocialist
movement in the United States.2

In this way Klein, who in No Logo ushered
in a new generational critique of commodity culture, and who in The Shock Doctrine established herself as perhaps
the most prominent North American critic of neoliberal disaster capitalism,
signals that she has now, in William Morris’s famous metaphor, crossed “the river
of fire” to become a critic of capital as a system.3 The reason is climate change, including
the fact that we have waited too long to address it, and the reality that
nothing short of an ecological revolution will now do the job.

In the age of climate change, Klein argues, a system based on
ever-expanding capital accumulation and exponential economic growth is no
longer compatible with human well-being and progress—or even with human
survival over the long run. We need therefore to reconstruct society along
lines that go against the endless amassing of wealth as the primary goal.
Society must be rebuilt on the basis of other principles, including the “regeneration”
of life itself and what she calls “ferocious love.”4 This reversal in the existing social
relations of production must begin immediately with a war on the fossil-fuel
industry and the economic growth imperative—when such growth means more carbon
emissions, more inequality, and more alienation of our humanity.

Klein’s crossing of the river of fire has led to a host of
liberal attacks on This Changes Everything,
often couched as criticisms emanating from the left. These establishment
criticisms of her work, we will demonstrate, are disingenuous, having little to
do with serious confrontation with her analysis. Rather, their primary purpose
is to rein in her ideas, bringing them into conformity with received opinion.
If that should prove impossible, the next step is to exclude her ideas from the
conversation. However, her message represents the growing consciousness of the
need for epochal change, and as such is not easily suppressed.

The Global Climateric

The core argument of This Changes Everything is
a historical one. If climate change had been addressed seriously in the 1960s,
when scientists first raised the issue in a major way, or even in the late
1980s and early ’90s, when James Hansen gave his famous testimony in Congress
on global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was first
established, and the Kyoto Protocol introduced, the problem could conceivably
have been addressed without a complete shakeup of the system. At that
historical moment, Klein suggests, it would still have been possible to cut
emissions by at most 2 percent a year.5

Today such incremental solutions are no longer conceivable even
in theory. The numbers are clear. Over 586 billion metric tons of carbon have
been emitted into the atmosphere. To avoid a 2°C (3.6°F) increase in global
average temperature—the edge of the cliff for the climate—it is necessary to
stay below a trillion metric tons in cumulative carbon emissions. At the
present rate of carbon emissions it is estimated that we will arrive at the one
trillionth metric ton—equivalent to the 2°C mark—in less than a quarter
century, around 2039.6 Once this point is reached, scientists
fear that there is a high probability that feedback mechanisms will come into
play with reverberations so great that we will no longer be able to control
where the thermometer stops in the end. If the world as it exists today is
still to avoid the 2°C increase—and the more dangerous 4°C, the point at which
disruption to life on the planet will be so great that civilization may no
longer be possible—real revolutionary ecological change, unleashing the full
power of an organized and rebellious humanity, is required.

What is necessary first and foremost is the cessation of
fossil-fuel combustion, bringing to a rapid end the energy regime that has
dominated since the Industrial Revolution. Simple arithmetic tells us that
there is no way to get down to the necessary zero emissions level, i.e., the
complete cessation of fossil-fuel combustion, in the next few decades without
implementing some kind of planned moratorium on economic growth, requiring
shrinking capital formation and reduced consumption in the richest countries of
the world system. We have no choice but to slam on the brakes and come to a
dead stop with respect to carbon emissions before we go over the climate cliff.
Never before in human history has civilization faced so daunting a challenge.

Klein draws here on the argument of Kevin Anderson, of the
Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain, who indicates that rich countries
will need to cut carbon emissions by 8­­–10 percent a year. “Our ongoing and
collective carbon profligacy,” Anderson writes, “has squandered any opportunity
for ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C budget.
Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands
revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony.”7

Instead of addressing climate change when it first became
critical in the 1990s, the world turned to the intensification of neoliberal
globalization, notably through the creation of the World Trade Organization. It
was the very success of the neoliberal campaign to remove most constraints on
the operations of capitalism, and the negative effect that this had on all
attempts to address the climate problem, Klein contends, that has made
“revolutionary levels of transformation” of the system the only real hope in
avoiding “climate chaos.”8 “As a result,” she explains,

we now find ourselves in a very difficult and
slightly ironic position. Because of those decades of hardcore emitting exactly
when we were supposed to be cutting back, the things that we must do to avoid
catastrophic warming are no longer just in conflict with the particular strain
of deregulated capitalism that triumphed in the 1980s. They are now in conflict
with the fundamental imperative at the heart of our economic model: grow or die….

Our economy is at war with many forms of life
on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a
contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to
avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be
changed, and it’s not the laws of nature….

Because of our lost decades, it is time to
turn this around now. Is it possible? Absolutely. Is it possible without
challenging the fundamental logic of deregulated capitalism? Not a chance.9

Of course, “the fundamental logic of deregulated capitalism” is
simply a roundabout way of pointing to the fundamental logic of
capitalism itself, its underlying drive toward capital accumulation,
which is hardly constrained at all in its accumulation function even in the
case of a strong regulatory environment. Instead, the state in a capitalist
society generally seeks to free up opportunities for capital accumulation on
behalf of the system as a whole, rationalizing market relations so as to
achieve greater overall, long-run expansion. As Paul Sweezy noted nearly
three-quarters of a century ago in The Theory of Capitalist
Development, “Speaking historically, control over capitalist
accumulation has never for a moment been regarded as a concern of the state;
economic legislation has rather had the aim of blunting class antagonisms, so
that accumulation, the normal aim of capitalist behavior, could go forward
smoothly and uninterruptedly.”10

To be sure, Klein herself occasionally seems to lose sight of
this basic fact, defining capitalism at one point as “consumption for
consumption’s sake,” thus failing to perceive the Galbraith dependence effect,
whereby the conditions under which we consume are structurally determined by
the conditions under which we produce.11 Nevertheless, the recognition that
capital accumulation or the drive for economic growth is the defining property,
not a mere attribute, of the system underlies her entire argument. Recognition
of this systemic property led the great conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter
to declare: “Stationary capitalism would be a contradictio in adjecto.”12

It follows that no mere technological wizardry—of the kind
ideologically promoted, for example, by the Breakthrough Institute—will prevent
us from breaking the carbon budget within several decades, as long as the
driving force of the reigning socioeconomic system is its own self-expansion.
Mere improvements in carbon efficiency are too small as long as the scale of
production is increasing, which has the effect of expanding the absolute level
of carbon dioxide emitted. The inevitable conclusion is that we must rapidly
reorganize society on other principles than that of stoking the engine of
capital with fossil fuels.

None of this, Klein assures us, is cause for despair. Rather,
confronting this harsh reality head on allows us to define the strategic
context in which the struggle to prevent climate change must be fought. It is
not primarily a technological problem unless one is trying to square the
circle: seeking to reconcile expanding capital accumulation with the
preservation of the climate. In fact, all sorts of practical solutions to
climate change exist at present and are consistent with the enhancement of
individual well-being and growth of human community. We can begin immediately
to implement the necessary changes such as: democratic planning at all levels
of society; introduction of sustainable energy technology; heightened public
transportation; reductions in economic and ecological waste; a slowdown in the
treadmill of production; redistribution of wealth and power; and above all an
emphasis on sustainable human development.13

There are ample historical precedents. We could have a crash
program, as in wartime, where populations sacrificed for the common good. In
England during the Second World War, Klein observes, driving automobiles
virtually ceased. In the United States, the automobile industry was converted
in the space of half a year from producing cars to manufacturing trucks, tanks,
and planes for the war machine. The necessary rationing—since the price system
recognizes nothing but money—can be carried out in an egalitarian manner.
Indeed, the purpose of rationing is always to share the sacrifices that have to
be made when resources are constrained, and thus it can create a sense of real
community, of all being in this together, in responding to a genuine emergency.
Although Klein does not refer to it, one of the most inspiring historical
examples of this was the slogan “Everyone Eats the Same” introduced in the
initial phases of the Cuban Revolution and followed to an extraordinary extent
throughout the society. Further, wartime mobilization and rationing are not the
only historical examples on which we can draw. The New Deal in the United
States, she indicates, focused on public investment and direct promotion of the
public good, aimed at the enhancement of use values rather than exchange
values.14

Mainstream critics of This Changes Everything often
willfully confuse its emphasis on degrowth with the austerity policies
associated with neoliberalism. However, Klein’s perspective, as we have seen,
could not be more different, since it is about the rational use of resources
under conditions of absolute necessity and the promotion of equality and
community. Nevertheless, she could strengthen her case in this respect by
drawing on monopoly-capital theory and its critique of the prodigious waste in
our economy, whereby only a miniscule proportion of production and human labor
is now devoted to actual human needs as opposed to market-generated wants. As
the author of No Logo, Klein is well aware of the
marketing madness that characterizes the contemporary commodity economy,
causing the United States alone to spend more than a trillion dollars a year on
the sales effort.15

What is required in a rich country such as the United States at
present, as detailed in This Changes Everything,
is not an abandonment of all the comforts of civilization but a reversion to
the standard of living of the 1970s—two decades into what Galbraith dubbed “the
affluent society.” A return to a lower per capita output (in GDP terms) could
be made feasible with redistribution of income and wealth, social planning,
decreases in working time, and universal satisfaction of genuine human needs (a
sustainable environment; clean air and water; ample food, clothing, and
shelter; and high-quality health care, education, public transportation, and
community-cultural life) such that most people would experience a substantial
improvement in their daily lives.16 What Klein envisions here would truly be
an ecological-cultural revolution. All that is really required, since the
necessary technological means already exist, is people power: the democratic
mass mobilization of the population.

Such people power, Klein is convinced, is already emerging in
the context of the present planetary emergency. It can be seen in the massive
but diffuse social-environmental movement, stretching across the globe,
representing the struggles of tens of millions of activists worldwide, to which
she gives (or rather takes from the movement itself) the name Blockadia.
Numberless individuals are putting themselves on the line, confronting power,
and frequently facing arrest, in their opposition to the fossil-fuel industry
and capitalism itself. Indigenous peoples are organizing worldwide and taking a
leading role in the environmental revolt, as in the Idle No More movement in
Canada. Anti-systemic, ecologically motivated struggles are on the rise on
every continent.

The primary burden for mitigating climate change necessarily
resides with the rich countries, which are historically responsible for the
great bulk of the carbon added to the atmosphere since the Industrial
Revolution and still emit the most carbon per capita today. The
disproportionate responsibility of these nations for climate change is even
greater once the final consumption of goods is factored into the accounting.
Poor countries are heavily dependent on producing export goods for
multinational corporations to be sold to consumers at the center of the world
capitalist economy. Hence, the carbon emissions associated with such exports
are rightly assigned to the rich nations importing these goods rather than the
poor ones exporting them. Moreover, the rich countries have ample resources
available to address the problem and carry out the necessary process of social
regeneration without seriously compromising the basic welfare of their
populations. In these societies, the problem is no longer one of increasing per
capita wealth, but rather one of the rational, sustainable, and just
organization of society. Klein evokes the spirit of Seattle in 1999 and Occupy
Wall Street in 2011 to argue that sparks igniting radical ecological change
exist even in North America, where growing numbers of people are prepared to
join a global peoples’ alliance. Essential to the overall struggle, she
insists, is the explicit recognition of ecological or climate debt owed by the
global North to the global South.17

The left is not spared critical scrutiny in Klein’s work. She
acknowledges the existence of a powerful ecological critique within Marxism,
and quotes Marx on “capitalism’s ‘irreparable rift’ with ‘the natural laws of
life itself.‘” Nevertheless, she points to the high carbon
emissions of Soviet-type societies, and the heavy dependence of the economies
of Bolivia and Venezuela on natural resource extraction, notwithstanding the
many social justice initiatives they have introduced. She questions the support
given by Greece’s SYRIZA Party to offshore oil exploration in the Aegean. Many
of those on the left, and particularly the so-called liberal-left, with their
Keynesian predilections, continue to see an expansion of the treadmill of
production, even in the rich countries, as the sole means of social advance.18 Klein’s criticisms here are important,
but could have benefited, with respect to the periphery, from a consideration
of the structure of the imperialist world economy, which is designed
specifically to close off options to the poorer countries and force them to
meet the needs of the richer ones. This creates a trap that even a Movement
Toward Socialism with deep ecological and indigenous values like that of
present-day Bolivia cannot seek to overcome without deep contradictions.19

“The unfinished business of liberation,” Klein counsels,
requires “a process of rebuilding and reinventing the very idea of the
collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many
decades of attack and neglect.”20 To accomplish this, it is necessary to
build the greatest mass movement of humanity for revolutionary change that the
world has ever seen: a challenge that is captured in the title to her
conclusion: “The Leap Years: Just Enough Time for Impossible.” If this seems
utopian, her answer would be that the world is heading towards something worse
than mere dystopia: unending, cumulative, climate catastrophe, threatening
civilization and countless species, including our own.21

Liberal Critics as Gatekeepers

Confronted with Klein’s powerful argument in This Changes Everything, liberal pundits have rushed to
rein in her arguments so that her ideas are less in conflict with the system.
Even where the issue is planetary ecological catastrophe, imperiling hundreds
of millions of people, future generations, civilization, and the human species
itself, the inviolable rule remains the same: the permanency of capitalism is
not to be questioned.

As Noam Chomsky explains, liberal opinion plays a vital
gatekeeping role for the system, defining itself as the rational left of
center, and constituting the outer boundaries of received opinion. Since most
of the populace in the United States and the world as a whole is objectively at
odds with the regime of capital, it is crucial to the central propaganda
function of the media to declare as “off limits” any position that questions
the foundations of the system itself. The media effectively says: “Thus far and
no further.” To venture farther left beyond the narrow confines of what is
permitted within liberal discourse is deemed equivalent to taking “off from the
planet.”22

In the case of an influential radical journalist, activist, and
best-selling author, like Klein, liberal critics seek first and foremost to
refashion her message in ways compatible with the system. They offer her the
opportunity to remain within the liberal fraternity—if she will only agree to
conform to its rules. The aim is not simply to contain Klein herself but also
the movement as a whole that she represents. Thus we find expressions of
sympathy for what is presented as her general outlook. Accompanying all such
praise, however, is a subtle recasting of her argument in order to blunt its
criticism of the system. For example, it is perfectly permissible on liberal
grounds to criticize neoliberal disaster capitalism, as an extreme policy
regime. This should at no time, however, extend to a blanket critique of
capitalism. Liberal discussions of This Changes Everything,
insofar as they are positive at all, are careful to interpret it as adhering to
the former position.

Yet, the very same seemingly soft-spoken liberal pundits are not
above simultaneously brandishing a big stick at the slightest sign of transgression
of the Thus Far and No Further principle. If it should turn out that Klein is
really serious in arguing that “this changes everything” and actually sees our
reality as one of “capitalism vs. the climate,” then, we are told, she has
Taken Off From the Planet, and has lost her right to be heard within the mass
media or to be considered part of the conversation at all. The aim here is to
issue a stern warning—to remind everyone of the rules by which the game is
played, and the serious sanctions to be imposed on those not conforming. The
penalty for too great a deviation in this respect is excommunication from the
mainstream, to be enforced by the corporate media. Noam Chomsky may be the most
influential intellectual figure alive in the world today, but he is generally
considered beyond the pale and thus persona non grata where
the U.S. media is concerned.

None of this of course is new. Invited to speak at University
College, Oxford in 1883, with his great friend John Ruskin in the chair,
William Morris, Victorian England’s celebrated artist, master-artisan, and epic
poet, author of The Earthly Paradise, shocked his
audience by publicly declaring himself “one of the people called Socialists.”
The guardians of the official order (the Podsnaps of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend) immediately rose up to denounce
him—overriding Ruskin’s protests—declaring that if they had known of Morris’s
intentions he would not have been given loan of the hall. They gave notice then
and there that he was no longer welcome at Oxford or in establishment circles.
As historian E.P. Thompson put it, “Morris had crossed the ‘river of fire.’ And
the campaign to silence him had begun.”23

Klein, however, presents a special problem for today’s
gatekeepers. Her opposition to the logic of capital in This Changes Everything is not couched primarily
in the traditional terms of the left, concerned mainly with issues of
exploitation. Rather, she makes it clear that what has finally induced her to
cross the river of fire is an impending threat to the survival of civilization
and humanity itself. She calls for a broad revolt of humanity against
capitalism and for the creation of a more sustainable society in response to
the epochal challenge of our time. This is an altogether different kind of
animal—one that liberals cannot dismiss out of hand without seeming to go
against the scientific consensus and concern for humanity as a whole.

Further complicating matters, Klein upsets the existing order of
things in her book by declaring “the right is right.” By this she means that
the political right’s position on climate change is largely motivated by what
it correctly sees as an Either/Or question of capitalism vs. the climate.
Hence, conservatives seek to deny climate change—even rejecting the science—in
their determination to defend capitalism. In contrast, liberal
ideologues—caught in the selfsame trap of capitalism vs. the climate—tend to
waffle, accepting most of the science, while turning around and contradicting
themselves by downplaying the logical implications for society. They pretend
that there are easy, virtually painless, non-disruptive ways out of this trap
via still undeveloped technology, market magic, and mild government
regulation—presumably allowing climate change to be mitigated without seriously
affecting the capitalist economy. Rather than accepting the Either/Or of
capitalism against the climate, liberals convert the problem into one of neoliberalism
vs. the climate, insisting that greater regulation, including such measures as
carbon trading and carbon offsets, constitutes the solution, with no need to
address the fundamental logic of the economic and social system.

Ultimately, it is this liberal form of denialism that is the
more dangerous since it denies the social dimension of the problem and blocks
the necessary social solutions. Hence, it is the liberal view that is the main
target of Klein’s book. In a wider sense, though, conservatives and liberals
can be seen as mutually taking part in a dance in which they join hands to
block any solution that requires going against the system. The conservative
Tweedle Dums dance to the tune that the cost of addressing climate change is
too high and threatens the capitalist system. Hence, the science that points to
the problem must be denied. The liberal Tweedle Dees dance to the tune that the
science is correct, but that the whole problem can readily be solved with a few
virtually costless tweaks here and there, put into place by a new regulatory
regime. Hence, the system itself is never an issue.

It is her constant exposure of this establishment farce that
makes Klein’s criticism so dangerous. She demands that the gates be flung open
and the room for democratic political and social maneuver be expanded
enormously. What is needed, for starters, is a pro-democracy movement not
simply in the periphery of the capitalist world but at the center of the system
itself, where the global plutocracy has its main headquarters.

The task from a ruling-class governing perspective, then, is to
find a way to contain or neutralize Klein’s views and those of the entire
radical climate movement. The ideas she represents are to be included in the
corporate media conversation only under extreme sufferance, and then only
insofar as they can be corralled and rebranded to fit within a generally
liberal, reformist perspective: one that does not threaten the class-based
system of capital accumulation.

Rob Nixon can be credited with laying out the general liberal
strategy in this respect in a review of Klein’s book in the New York Times. He declares outright that Klein has
written “the most momentous and contentious environmental book since ‘Silent
Spring.‘” He strongly applauds her for her criticisms of
climate change deniers, and for revealing how industry has corrupted the
political process, delaying climate action. All of this, however, is
preliminary to his attempt to rein in her argument. There is a serious flaw in
her book, we are told, evident in her subtitle, Capitalism
vs. the Climate. “What’s with the subtitle?” he scornfully asks.
Then stepping in as Klein’s friend and protector, Nixon tells New York Times readers that the subtitle is simply
a mistake, to be ignored. We should not be thrown off, he proclaims, by a
“subtitle” that “sounds like a P.R. person’s idea of a marquee cage fight.”
Rather, “Klein’s adversary is neoliberalism—the extreme capitalism that has
birthed our era of extreme extraction.” In this subtle recasting of her
argument, Klein reemerges as a mere critic of capitalist excess, rejecting
specific attributes taken on by the system in its neoliberal phase that can be
easily discarded, and that do not touch the system’s fundamental properties.
Her goal, we are told, is the same as in The Shock Doctrine:
turning back the neoliberal “counterrevolution,” returning us to a more humane
Golden Age liberal order. Her subtitle can therefore be dismissed in its
entirety, as it “belies the sophistication” of her work: code for her supposed
conformity to the Thus Far and No Further principle. Employing ridicule as a
gatekeeping device—with the implication that this is the sorry fate that awaits
anyone who transgresses Thus Far and No Further—Nixon states that “Klein is smart
and pragmatic enough to shun the never-never land of capitalism’s global
overthrow.”24

Dave Pruett in The Huffington Post quickly
falls into step, showing how well he comprehends the general strategy already
outlined by Nixon in the New York Times. At
the same time, he indicates his readiness to pull in the reins a bit more. Thus
we find again that Klein’s book is a “masterpiece,” to be put on the same shelf
as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. And
once again we learn that her subtitle, Capitalism vs. the Climate is
a “misnomer.” Resorting to a classic Cold War ploy, Pruett further insinuates
that the subtitle gives “critics room to accuse Klein of advocating for some
discredited Soviet-style state-regulated economy.” Of course such critics, he
turns around and says, would surely be wrong. Klein’s argument in This Changes Everythingis really nothing more than a
criticism of “unbridled capitalism—that is, neoliberalism.”
Moreover, the “true culprit” of her argument is even more specific than this: “extractivism,” or the extreme exploitation of
non-renewable natural resources. Still, Pruett, through his classic Cold War
ploy, has with consummate skill planted in advance a lingering doubt and a
warning in the mind of the reader, along with an implicit threat directed at
Klein herself. If it should turn out that Klein is serious about her subtitle,
and she is actually talking about “capitalism vs. the climate,” then she is
discredited in advance by the fate of the Soviet Union, with which she is then
to be associated.25

Approaching This Changes Everything much
more bluntly, Elizabeth Kolbert, writing for theNew York Review of Books,
quickly lets us know that she has not come to praise Klein but to bury her.
Klein’s references to conservation, “managed degrowth,” and the need to shrink
humanity’s ecological footprint, Kolbert says, are all non-marketable ideas, to
be condemned on straightforwardly capitalist-consumerist principles. Such
strategies and actions will not sell to today’s consumers, even if the future
of coming generations is in jeopardy. Nothing will get people to give up “HDTV
or trips to the mall or the family car.” Unless it is demonstrated how acting
on climate change will result in a “minimal disruption to ‘the American way of
life,‘”she asserts, nothing said with respect to climate change
action matters at all. Klein has simply provided a convenient “fable” of little
real value. This Changes Everything is indicted for
having violated accepted commercial axioms in its core thesis, which Kolbert
converts into an argument for extreme austerity. Klein is to be faulted for her
grandiose schemes that do not fit into U.S. consumer society, and for not
“looking at all closely at what this [reduction in the commodity economy] would
entail.” Klein has failed to specify exactly how many watts of electricity per
capita will be consumed under her plan. It is much easier, Kolbert seems to
say, for U.S. consumers to imagine the end of a climate permitting human
survival than to envision the end of two-million-square-foot shopping malls.26

David Ulin in the Los Angeles Times unveils
still another weapon in the liberal arsenal, denouncing Klein for her optimism
and her faith in humanity. “There is, in places,” he emphasizes, “a disconnect
between her [Klein’s] idealism and her realism, what she thinks ought to happen
and what she recognizes likely will.” Social analysis, in Ulin’s view, seems to
be reduced to forecasting the most likely outcomes. Klein apparently failed to
consult with Las Vegas oddsmakers before making her case for saving humanity.
Klein’s penchant for idealism, he declares, “is most glaring in her suggestions
for large-scale policy mitigation, which can seem simplistic, relying on
notions of fairness…that corporate culture does not
share.” Regrettably, Ulin does not tell us exactly where the kind of climate
justice programs put in place by Exxon and Walmart’s “corporate culture” will
actually lead us in the end. However, he does give us a specious clue in his
final paragraph, describing what he apparently considers to be the most
realistic scenario. The planet, we are informed, “has ample power to rock,
burn, and shake us off completely.” The earth will go on without us.27

Other liberal gatekeepers pull out all the stops, attacking not
just every radical notion in Klein’s book but the book as a whole, and even
Klein herself. Writing for the influential liberal news and opinion website,
the Daily Beast, Michael Signer characterizes Klein’s book
as “a curiously clueless manifesto.” It will not spark a movement against
carbon, in part because Klein “rejects capitalism, market mechanisms, and even,
seemingly, profit motives and corporate governance.” She offers “a compelling
story,” but one that “creates the paradoxical effect of making this
perspicacious and successful author seem like an idiot.” Signer depicts her as
if she has Taken Off From the Planet simply by refusing to stay within the
narrow spectrum of opinion defined by the Wall Street Journal on
the one side and the New York Times on
the other. “For anyone who believes in capitalism and political leadership,” we
are informed, “her book won’t change anything at all.”28

Mark Jaccard, an orthodox economist writing for the Literary Review of Canada, declares thatThis Changes Everything ignores how market-based
mechanisms are a powerful means for reducing carbon emissions. However, his
main evidence for this contention is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signing of a
climate bill in California in 2006, which is supposed to reduce the state’s
carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Unfortunately for Jaccard’s claim, a
little over a week before he criticized Klein on the basis of the California
experiment, the Los Angeles Times broke the
story that California’s emissions reduction initiative was in some respects a
“shell game,” as California was reducing emissions on paper while emissions
were growing in surrounding states from which California was also increasingly
purchasing power.29Add to this the facts that California’s
initiative is more state-based than capital-based, and that the real problem is
not one of getting down to 1990 level emissions, but getting down to pre-1760
level emissions, i.e., carbon emissions eventually have to fall to zero—and not
just in California but worldwide.

Jaccard goes on to accuse Klein of wearing “‘blame capitalism’ blinders” that keep her from seeing the
actual difficulties that make dealing with climate so imposing. This includes
her failure to perceive the “Faustian dilemma” associated with fossil fuels,
given that they have yielded so many benefits for humanity and can offer many
more to the poor of the world. “This dilemma,” which he is so proud to have
discovered, “is not the fault of capitalism.” Indeed, capitalist economics, we
are told, is already well equipped to solve the climate problem and only
misguided state policies stand in the way. Drawing upon an argument presented
by Paul Krugman in his New York Times column,
Jaccard suggests that “greenhouse gas reductions have proven to be not nearly
as costly as science deniers on the right and anti-growth activists on the left
would have us believe.” Krugman, a Tweedle Dee, rejects the carefree Tweedle
Dum melody whereby climate change, as a threat to the system, is simply wished
away along with the science. He counters this simple, carefree tune with what
he regards as a more complex, harmonious song in which the problem is whisked
away in spite of the science by means of a few virtually costless market
regulations. So convinced is Jaccard himself of capitalism’s basic harmonious
relation to the climate that he simply turns a deaf ear to Klein’s impressive
account of the vast system-scale changes required to stop climate change.30

Will Boisvert, commenting on behalf of the self-described
“post-environmentalist” Breakthrough Institute, condemns Klein and the entire
environmental movement in an article pointedly entitled, “The Left vs. the
Climate: Why Progressives Should Reject Naomi Klein’s Pastoral Fantasy—and
Embrace Our High Energy Planet.” Apparently it is not industry that is
destroying a livable climate through its carbon dioxide emissions, but rather
environmentalists, by refusing to adopt the Breakthrough Institute’s
technological crusade for surmounting nature’s limits on a planetary scale. As
Breakthrough senior fellow Bruno Latour writes in an article for the Institute,
it is necessary “to love your monsters,” meaning the kind of Frankenstein
creations envisioned in Mary Shelley’s novel. Humanity should be prepared to
put its full trust, the Breakthrough Institute tells us, in such wondrous
technological answers as nuclear power, “clean coal,” geoengineering, and
fracking. For its skepticism regarding such technologies, the whole left (and
much of the scientific community) is branded as a bunch of Luddites. As
Boisvert exclaims in terms designed to delight the entire corporate sector:

To make a useful contribution to changing
everything, the Left could begin by changing itself. It could start by redoing
its risk assessments and rethinking its phobic hostility to nuclear power. It
could abandon the infatuation with populist insurrection and advance a serious
politics of systematic state action. It could stop glamorizing austerity under
the guise of spiritual authenticity and put development prominently on its
environmental agenda. It could accept that industry and technology do indeed
distance us from nature—and in doing so can protect nature from human
extractions. And it could realize that, as obnoxious as capitalism can be,
scapegoating it won’t spare us the hard thinking and hard trade-offs that a
sustainable future requires.31

Boisvert here echoes Erle Ellis, who, in an earlier essay for
the Breakthrough Institute, contended that climate change is not a catastrophic
threat, because “human systems are prepared to adapt to and prosper in the
hotter, less biodiverse planet that we are busily creating.” On this basis,
Boisvert chastises Klein and all who think like her for refusing to celebrate
capitalism’s creative destruction of everything in existence.32

Klein of course is not caught completely unaware by such
attacks. For those imbued in the values of the current system, she writes in
her book, “changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and
disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental,
growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism.”33 Indeed, all of the mainstream challenges
to This Changes Everything discussed above have one
thing in common: they insist that capitalism is the “end of history,” and that
the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution and the
threat that this represents to life as we know it change nothing about today’s
Panglossian best of all possible worlds.

The Ultimate Line of Defense

Naturally, it is not simply liberals, but also socialists, in
some cases, who have attacked This Changes Everything.
Socialist critics, though far more sympathetic with her analysis, are inclined
to fault her book for not being explicit enough about the nature of system
change, the full scale of the transformations required, and the need for
socialism.34 Klein says little about the vital
question of the working class, without which the revolutionary changes she
envisions are impossible. It is therefore necessary to ask: To what extent is
the ultimate goal to build a new movement toward socialism, a society to be
controlled by the associated producers? Such questions still remain unanswered
by the left climate movement and by Klein herself.

In our view, though, it is difficult to fault Klein for her
silences in this respect. Her aim at present is clearly confined to the urgent
and strategic—if more limited—one of making the broad case for System Change
Not Climate Change. Millions of people, she believes, are crossing or are on
the brink of crossing the river of fire. Capitalism, they charge, is now
obsolete, since it is no longer compatible either with our survival as a
species or our welfare as individual human beings. Hence, we need to build
society anew in our time with all the human creativity and collective
imagination at our disposal. It is this burgeoning global movement that is now
demanding anti-capitalist and post-capitalist solutions. Klein sees herself
merely as the people’s megaphone in this respect. The goal, she explains, is a
complex social one of fusing all of the many anti-systemic movements of the
left. The struggle to save a habitable earth is humanity’s
ultimate line of defense—but one that at the same time requires that
we take the offensive, finding ways to move forward collectively, extending the
boundaries of liberated space. David Harvey usefully describes this fusion of
movements as a co-revolutionary strategy.35

Is the vision presented in This Changes Everything compatible
with a classical socialist position? Given the deep ecological commitments
displayed by Marx, Engels, and Morris, there is little room for doubt—which is
not to deny that socialists need to engage in self-criticism, given past
failures to implement ecological values and the new challenges that
characterize our epoch. Yet, the whole question strikes us in a way as a bit
odd, since historical materialism does not represent a rigid, set position, but
is rather the ongoing struggle for a world of substantive equality and
sustainable human development. As Morris wrote in A Dream of John Ball:

But while I pondered all these things, and how
men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about
in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they
meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name—while
I pondered all this, John Ball began to speak again in the same soft and clear
voice with which he had left off.

In this “soft and clear voice,” Ball, a leader in the
fourteenth-century English Peasant’s Revolt, proceeded, in Morris’s retelling,
to declare that the one true end was “Fellowship on earth”—an end that was also
the movement of the people and could never be stopped.36

Klein offers us anew this same vision of human community borne
of an epoch of revolutionary change. “There is little doubt,” she declares in
her own clear voice,

that another crisis will see us in the streets
and squares once again, taking us all by surprise. The real question is what
progressive forces will make of that moment, the power and confidence with
which it will be seized. Because these moments when the impossible seems
suddenly possible are excruciatingly rare and precious. That means more must be
made of them. The next time one arises, it must be harnessed not only to
denounce the world as it is, and build fleeting pockets of liberated space. It
must be the catalyst to actually build the world that will keep us all safe.
The stakes are simply too high, and time too short, to settle for anything
less.37

The ultimate goal of course is not simply “to build the world
that will keep us all safe” but to build a world of genuine equality and human
community—the only conceivable basis for sustainable human development.
Equality, Simón Bolívar exclaimed, is “the law of laws.”38

6.↩Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report,http://ipcc.ch; trillionthtonne.org, accessed January 3, 2015; “Carbon Budget
Message of IPCC Report Reveals Daunting Challenge,” Huffington Post, October 4, 2013, http://huffingtonpost.com; Myles Allen, et. al., “The Exit
Strategy,” Nature Reports Climate Change,
April 30, 2009, http://nature.com, 56–58. It should be noted that the trillionth metric ton
calculation is based on carbon, not carbon dioxide. Moreover, the 2039 estimate
of the point at which the trillion metric ton will be reached, made bytrillionthtonne.org (sponsored by scientists at Oxford
University), should be regarded as quite optimistic under present,
business-as-usual conditions, since less than three years ago, at the end of
2012, it was estimated that the trillion ton would be reached in 2043, or in
thirty-one years. (See John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Planetary
Emergency,” Monthly Review 64, no. 7
[December 2012]: 2.) The gap, according to these estimates, is thus closing
faster as time passes and nothing is done to reduce emissions.

8.↩Klein, This Changes Everything,
19, 56. The fact that neoliberal globalization and the creation of the WTO had
permanently derailed the movement associated with the Earth Summit in Rio in
1993, including the attempt to prevent climate change, was stressed by one of
us more than a dozen years ago at the World Summit for Sustainable Development
in Johannesburg 2002, when Klein was present. See John Bellamy Foster, “A Planetary Defeat: The Failure of
Global Environmental Reform,”Monthly Review 54, no. 8
(January 2003): 1–9, originally based on several talks delivered in
Johannesburg, August 2002.

11.↩Klein, This Changes Everything,
179; John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New
York: New American Library, 1984), 121­–28. As the author of No Logo, Klein is of course aware of the contradictions
of consumption under capitalist commodity production.

The model of creating sustainability and
community as the cell of a new socialist society offered by the Nearings and
Seeger is more important now than ever. But more than half a century later
capitalism has extended its “suicidal destructivity” to the point that in the
early twenty-first century we are running out of time on a global basis. This
is the message of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything:
Capitalism vs. the Climate. The central thesis of her book is that
the solution to the climate-change emergency must now be an anti-capitalist
(not just an anti-neoliberal) one, because in the limited time
that we still have available nothing but a reversal in the dominant capital
logic of society and the substitution of an alternative people logic will
suffice.

In courageously presenting this conclusion,
Klein opened herself up to a host of liberal gatekeeping attacks on her work,
all of which presented the same criticism: contravening neoliberalism is within
the bounds of the acceptable range of ideas as determined by the dominant media
system; the critique of capitalism—even in the face of impending global
catastrophe—is not. It was this question of the establishment response to
Klein’s work that John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark took up in the February
2015 Review of the Month, “Crossing the River of Fire.” Since the February
issue of MR went to the printer, Klein herself has
responded to these liberal attacks on her book:

[There’s something else that] has come up in a
few reviews that I am confused by. The issue of: Is it anti-neoliberal? Or is
it anti-capitalist? A few reviewers have made the claim that the case I’m
making is against neoliberalism and not against capitalism. And I think I’m
really clear in the book, and I don’t know how I could be any clearer: it’s
both. That in terms of the tools that we needed to respond to this crisis when
it hit in the late 80s and 90s, [these] were the very tools that were under
fire by the neoliberal project: regulation, taxation, the very idea of
collective action in society and so on. The advancement of free trade created
more barriers. But because we have waited as long as we have, and we now need
to cut our emissions as deeply as we need to, we now have a conflict not just
with neoliberalism, but a conflict with capitalism because it challenges the
growth imperative. So I realize this is a two-stage argument, but it’s both. (Naomi
Klein, “Capitalism vs. the
Climate: An Interview,” Human Geography 8, no. 1
[2015],http://hugeog.com)

Klein’s argument here is irrefutable. To be
sure, in criticizing neoliberalism for removing the tools needed to address
climate change she deftly avoids the issue of whether capital as a system could
ever have seriously mitigated the problem. Nevertheless, what cannot be
questioned on rational grounds is her contention that the degree of carbon
dioxide reductions now needed to stay within the planetary carbon budget—a 3
percent per annum cut in carbon worldwide, which would in reality translate
into a reduction of 8–10 percent per year in the rich countries—is incompatible
with a system based on capital accumulation and exponential economic growth.
Add to this the fact that climate change is only part of the overall planetary
environmental crisis, which also encompasses such issues as the loss of
biodiversity, the disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, ocean
acidification, degradation of freshwater resources, and disappearing land
cover. What is needed, then, is what the great ecologist Howard Odum called “a
prosperous way down” (see John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Planetary Emergency,” MR, December 2012,
9–20). Klein is realistic and radical enough to realize that her recognition of
this necessity, together with her readiness to act on it, puts her and the
entire left climate movement that she represents in conflict with capital as a system—and not just with its most virulent
form of neoliberalism. It is, as she says, a “two stage argument,” and we are
now in the second stage. There is no avoiding the fact that the logic of
capital accumulation must give way if we are to have a reasonable chance of
saving civilization and humanity.

Klein’s Plea for Sanity

Klein’s book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism
vs. the Climate, is a vital addition to the critiques of
capitalism. Here she is, as chaos is foreseen by the consensus of
scientists if the rising global temperature is not stopped and reversed soon,
calling for faith in human beings and the rejection of the US corporate
state. Here she is in 2014, tracing the awful history of the rise of the
right wing mainly in the Republican Party, at a moment of possible, terrible
climate chaos, expressing hope. Hers is a lucid plea for sanity and
compassion at a moment when the irrationalism of misology and misoneism have
gained power over the government.

Related reading:
Harvey Kaye’s The Fight for the Four Freedoms, 2014 (a history
of the rise of FDR’s/Democratic Party’s New Deal and belief in affirmative
government and their decline under the new, reactionary Republican onslaught)
and Rudolf Rocker’s Nationalism and Culture, 1933/1937
(written in Berlin while Hitler’s Brown Shirts were marching outside his
window, a denunciation of the corrosive effects of nationalistic exceptionalism).
Dick

ABEL
TOMLINSON’S TWO-PART REVIEW OF KLEIN in Free Weekly, 2-15-15.

Capitalism Is Beating
Our Mother to Death, Help Her

In the bestselling book This
Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate, journalist Naomi
Klein investigates power as the issue. Much attention is given to runaway
emissions, and less on the fundamental economic and political system itself.
Virtually all climate scientists agree that we are destroying our planet, with
abundant evidence, but confusion remains on a solution. She clears this up:
free market capitalist ideology must be confronted.

Before serious
progress is made, climate change denial among everyone needs to be
recognized. Klein explains that denial is not limited merely to anti-science politicians. It exists among the entire public in
different forms. Many of us choose to "look away" using various
unhelpful rationalizations.

We must courageously face
the frightening truth of the climate crisis. This must be treated like the
global emergency it is because massive investment is required, akin to war or
bank bailouts. Undeniably, this must occur because it is the greatest threat
humankind has ever faced, rivaled only by nuclear holocaust.

Worldwide, governmental leaders are failing
us. During negotiations leading to weak nonbinding agreements
from 1990-2013, climate emissions have increased 61 percent. The cold reality
is our current leaders are not going to save us.

Klein concludes with
systems researcher Dr. Brad Werner’s poignant question: “Is Earth F**ked?” Werner presented this topic at a 2012 meeting of
the American Geophysical Union, a meeting of 24,000 earth and space scientists.
He detailed much complex mathematical information to answer this question, but
the take home answer was “more or less” because of global capitalism’s relentless pursuit of growth, capital
accumulation, and unfettered resource consumption.

Thankfully, there was a variable for hope,
which Werner labeled “resistance.” This is defined as movements of people
engaging in “environmental direct action…protests, blockades and sabotage,”
which cause “friction” with capitalism. According to Werner and Klein, only
“mass social movements can save us now.”

In the book, Klein
investigated various “friction” movements, past and present. Historically, many
social movements have proven disruptive to the status quo. The climate
challenge, on the other hand, requires a “radical economic transformation,”
which can be more difficult because social changes are less costly.

In terms of powerful economic shifts, the best
examples, besides colonial independence movements, are the labor movement after
the Great Depression and slavery abolition. The labor movement and mass
unionization resulted in a great wealth transfer from the capitalist class to
the working class. This included many social programs, public infrastructure
investment and regulation of Wall Street.

However, the slavery abolition movement is
perhaps the best analogy. In his essay “The New Abolitionism.” journalist Chris
Hayes wrote, “the climate justice movement is demanding that an existing set of
political and economic interests be forced to say goodbye to trillions of
dollars in wealth.” Hayes also adds that “in 1860, slaves represented about 16
percent of…all the wealth” in the United States, “which in today’s terms is a
stunning $10 trillion.” This is approximately the value of fossil fuels that
must remain in the ground to avoid a 2 degree Celsius global temperature
increase. In both cases, the cost to elites is steep, but the new demands could
end the reigning oligarchy.

Although many
past movements, such as for civil rights, succeeded legally, few did so
economically. This is why great injustice, poverty and discrimination still
remain. Many of these movements for equal rights still exist in some form
today, so climate justice does not necessarily need a new movement. She writes,
“climate change can be the force—the grand push—that will bring together all
these still living movements. A rushing river fed by countless streams,
gathering force to finally reach the sea.” The lesson from past movements is
that major power shifts required massive social mobilization, when
"Activists were...everyone."

Ultimately, Klein
concludes it is not too late and we have plenty of solutions, but free market
ideology must be challenged. This worldview change can lead to
"rapid-fire lawmaking" like the New Deal. The idea that we are
"hopelessly selfish" as taught by television programming and
neoclassical economics must be abandoned. We must shift mindsets from
pure individualistic competition and hierarchical domination to
cooperation and interdependence. Additionally, like past movements, we must
embrace the language of morality, love and indignation to "alter public
opinion," as abolitionist Wendell Phillips put it.

Many people and
groups exist as infrastructure for a mass climate justice movement, but one
thing has yet to manifest. As journalist Luis Navarro said, this
thing is the right moment when pessimism is dissolved in the
"effervescence of rebellion." A precipitating spark must
occur, such as a certain crisis, economic, political or natural, which are
abundant. When that surprising event unfolds, Klein suggests activists
powerfully seize the moment to "denounce the world as it is...and build
the world that will keep us safe."

Related Announcement:
The monthly OMNI Climate Change Book Forum will be discussing this book
on March 1st at 1:30 p.m. in the Fayetteville Public Library. OMNI
350 organizer Shelley Buonaiuto and climatologist Dr. Robert McAfee
will chair the event.

Conclusion Summary
of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything

By Abel Tomlinson

In the powerful book This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein
concludes with systems researcher Dr. Brad Werner’s poignant question: “Is
Earth F**ked?” Werner presented this topic at a 2012 meeting of the American
Geophysical Union, a meeting of 24,000 earth and space scientists. Werner
detailed much complex mathematical information to answer this question, but the
take home answer was “More or less” because of global capitalism’s unfettered
resource consumption.

However, there
was a variable for hope, which Werner labeled “resistance.” This is defined as
movements of people engaging in “environmental direct action…protests,
blockades and sabotage,” which cause “friction” with capitalism. According to
Werner and Klein, only “mass social movements can save us now.”

Klein
investigated various early “friction” movements including Blockadia, fossil
fuel divestment, local laws against high-risk extraction, and Indigenous court
challenges. During her research, she also witnessed a great deal of
disheartening events, but still finds good reason for optimism. Knowledge of
dangerous extraction methods is growing along with the size and number of
activist movements. Although powerful companies stand to lose trillions of
dollars if serious climate solutions are implemented, Klein finds that
precedent for powerful social and political shifts.

Various social
movements have proven historically disruptive to the status quo, including civil,
women’s and gay rights. However, the climate challenge requires a “radical
economic transformation,” which can be more difficult because social changes
are comparatively less costly. In terms of powerful economic shifts, the best
examples, besides colonial independence movements, are the labor movement after
the Great Depression and slavery abolition. The labor movement and mass
unionization resulted in a great wealth transfer from the capitalist class to
the working class. This included many social programs, public infrastructure
investment and regulation of Wall Street.

However, the slavery
abolition movement is perhaps the best analogy for the climate movement. In his
essay “The New Abolitionism.” journalist Chris Hayes wrote, “the climate
justice movement is demanding that an existing set of political and economic
interests be forced to say goodbye to trillions of dollars in wealth.” Hayes
also adds that “in 1860, slaves represented about 16 percent of…all the wealth”
in the United States, “which in today’s terms is a stunning $10 trillion.” This
is approximately the value of fossil fuels that must remain in the ground to
avoid a 2 degree Celsius global temperature increase. In both cases, the cost
to elites is steep, but the new demands could end the oligarchy.

Klein makes the point
that many past movements, such as for civil rights, succeeded legally, but not
so much economically. This is why great injustice, poverty and discrimination
still remain. Many of these movements for equal rights still exist in some form
today, so climate change does not necessarily need a new movement. She writes,
“climate change can be the force—the grand push—that will bring together all
these still living movements. A rushing river fed by countless streams,
gathering force to finally reach the sea.” The lesson from past movements is
that major power shifts required massive social mobilization, when
"Activists were...everyone."

Ultimately, Klein
finds it is not too late and we have plenty of solutions, but there must be
challenge to free market ideology. This requires a change in
worldview, which can lead to "rapid-fire lawmaking" like the New
Deal. The idea that we are "hopelessly selfish" as taught by
television programming and economics must be confronted. We must
shift mindsets from pure independent competition and hierarchical
domination to cooperation and interdependence. Additionally, like past
movements, we must embrace the language of morality, love and indignation to
"alter public opinion," as abolitionist Wendell Phillips put
it.

Many people care
and many groups exist as infrastructure for a mass climate justice movement,
but one thing has yet to occur. As journalist Luis Navarro said,
this thing is the right moment when pessimism is dissolved in the "effervescence
of rebellion." A precipitating spark must occur, such as the
right crisis, economic, political or natural, which are all abundant. When that
surprising event unfolds, Klein suggests activists must powerfully seize the moment
to "denounce the world as it is...and build the world that will keep us
safe."

See ya’ Sunday.
I’ve only read about 20% so far, but will read more. She makes good
points, but I keep asking “wouldn’t a simple but steep carbon tax be able to
accomplish this, without the need for socializing our economy?”
Personally, I’m all for greater socialization—following something like
the Swedish path. But is this really necessary to solve global warming?
—Just a little food for thought for Sunday. - Art

DICK’S REPLY

Art, I think Klein
agrees with you about a tax and other remedies, and urges people to keep up
their efforts. But because they have failed so far by the measure of
temperature still rising, she has now turned her hope to mass mobilization for
fundamental change away from the principles and practices of capitalism.
A person with the greatest respectability at the highest levels of
environmentalism, James Gustave Speth,* apparently agrees with her, at least
certainly regarding the temperature rising to 2 degrees and possibly to 4, and
that new, much stronger actions are needed. In the latest number of Yes!
Magazine (Spring 2015) Bill McKibben reviewed Speth’s
memoir, Angels by the River. McKibben writes, drawing
from the memoir, my summary: The environmentalism based on “pragmatic and
incremental change” and that produced clean air and water “has so far proved
utterly unable to slow the rise of the planet’s temperature—a crisis so severe
and far-reaching that, unabated, it will wipe out all the gains of the past
four decades.” I hope Speth reviews Klein’s book so we can
determine exactly what he means by “unabated” here. Quoting Speth:
“’The final goal of the new environmental politics must be, ‘Build the
movement.’” *Speth was founder of the NRDC, chairman of Jimmy Carter’s
Council on Environmental Quality, head of the UN Development Program, founder
World Resources Institute, Dean of Yale’s School of Forestry and the
Environment, etc.

KLEIN INTERVIEWED BY
COLBERT

Here is a really
entertaining interview with Naomi Klein, and a big plug for the book we’re
reading for this Sunday’s discussion, on the Colbert Report.
She’s a gutsy lady and quick on her feet, even in the face of Colbert’s
withering humor.

Klein: The worst possible
moment. The connection between greenhouse gases and global warming has been a
mainstream political issue for humanity since 1988. It was precisely the time
that the Berlin Wall fell and Francis Fukuyama declared the "End of
History," the victory of Western capitalism. Canada and the US signed the
first free-trade agreement, which became the prototype for the rest of the
world.

SPIEGEL: So you're saying
that a new era of consumption and energy use began precisely at the moment when
sustainability and restraint would have been more appropriate?

Klein: Exactly. And it
was at precisely this moment that we were also being told that there was no
longer any such thing as social responsibility and collective action, that we
should leave everything to the market. We privatized our railways and the
energy grid, the WTO and the IMF locked in an unregulated capitalism.
Unfortunately, this led to an explosion in emissions.

SPIEGEL: You're an
activist, and you've blamed capitalism for all kinds of things over the years.
Now you're blaming it for climate change too?

Klein: That's no reason
for irony. The numbers tell the story. During the 1990s, emissions went up by 1
percent per year. Starting in 2000, they started to go up by an average of 3.4
percent. The American Dream was exported globally and consumer goods that we
thought of as essential to meet our needs expanded rapidly. We started seeing
ourselves exclusively as consumers. When shopping as a way of life is exported
to every corner of the globe, that requires energy. A lot of energy.

SPIEGEL: Let's go back to
our first question: Why have people been unable to stop this development?

Klein: We have
systematically given away the tools. Regulations of any kind are now scorned.
Governments no longer create tough rules that limit oil companies and other
corporations. This crisis fell into our laps in a disastrous way at the worst
possible moment. Now we're out of time. Where we are right now is a do-or-die
moment. If we don't act as a species, our future is in peril. We need to cut
emissions radically.

SPIEGEL: Let's go back to
another question: Are you not misappropriating the issue of climate change for
use in your critique of capitalism?

Klein: No. The economic
system that we have created has also created global warming. I didn't make this
up. The system is broken, income inequality is too great and the lack of
restraint on the part of the energy companies is disastrous.

SPIEGEL: Your son Toma is
two-and-a-half years old. What kind of world will he be living in when he graduates
from high school in 2030?

Klein: That is what is
being decided right now. I see signs that it could be a radically different
world from the one we have today -- and that change could either be quite
positive or extremely negative. In any case, it's already certain that it will
at least in part be a worse world. We're going to experience global warming and
far more natural disasters, that much is certain. But we still have time to
prevent truly catastrophic warming. We also have time to change our economic
system so that it does not become more brutal and merciless as it deals with
climate change.

SPIEGEL: What can be done
to improve the situation?

Klein: We have to make
some decisions now about what values are important to us and how we really want
to live. And of course it makes a difference if temperatures only rise by 2
degrees or if they rise by 4 or 5 degrees or more. It's still possible for us
humans to make the right decisions.

SPIEGEL: Twenty-six years
have passed since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded in
1988. We have known at least since then that CO2 emissions from the burning of
oil and coal is responsible for climate change. Yet little has been done to
address the problem. Haven't we already failed?

Klein: I view the
situation differently given the enormous price we will have to pay. As long as
we have the slightest chance of success or to minimize the damage, we have to
continue to fight.

SPIEGEL: Several years ago,
the international community set a target of limiting global warming to 2
degrees Celsius. Do you still consider that to be achievable?

Klein: Well, it's still a
physical possibility. We would have to immediately reduce global emissions by 6
percent a year. The wealthier countries would have to carry a greater burden,
meaning the United States and Europe would have to be cutting emissions by
around 8 to 10 percent a year. Immediately. It's not impossible. It is just
profoundly politically unrealistic under our current system.

SPIEGEL: You are saying our
societies aren't capable of doing so?

Klein: Yes. We need a
dramatic change both in policy and ideology, because there is a fundamental
difference between what the scientists are telling us we need to do and our
current political reality. We can't change the physical reality, so we must
change the political reality.

SPIEGEL: Is a society focused
on economic growth at all capable of fighting climate change successfully?

Klein: No. An economic
model based on indiscriminate growth inevitably leads to greater consumption
and to greater CO2 emissions. There can and must be growth in the future in
many low carbon parts of the economy: in green technologies, in public
transportation, in all the care-giving professions, in the arts and of course
in education. Right now, the core of our gross domestic product is comprised of
just consumption, imports and exports. We need to make cuts there. Anything
else would be self-deception.

SPIEGEL: The International
Monetary Fund makes the opposite claim. It says that economic growth and
climate protection are not mutually exclusive.

Klein: They're not
looking at the same numbers as I am. The first problem is that at all these
climate conferences, everyone acts as if we will arrive at our goal through
self-commitments and voluntary obligations. No one tells the oil companies
that, in the end, they are really going to have to give up. The second problem
is that these oil companies are going to fight like hell to protect what they
don't want to lose.

SPIEGEL: You seriously want
to eliminate the free market in order to save the climate?

Klein: I am not talking
about eliminating markets, but we need much more strategy, steering and
planning and a very different balance. The system in which we live is overly
obsessed with growth -- it's one that sees all growth as good. But there are
kinds of growth that are clearly not good. It's clear to me that my position is
in direct conflict with neo-liberalism. Is it true that in Germany, although
you have accelerated the shift to renewables, coal consumption is actually
increasing?

SPIEGEL: That was true from
2009 to 2013.

Klein: To me that is an
expression of this reluctance to decide on what is necessary. Germany is not
going to meet its emissions targets in the coming years either.

SPIEGEL: Is the Obama
presidency the worst thing that could have happened to the climate?

Klein: In a way. Not
because Obama is worse than a Republican. He's not. But because these eight
years were the biggest wasted opportunity of our lives. The right factors came
together in a truly historic convergence: awareness, urgency, the mood, his
political majority, the failure of the Big Three US automakers and even the
possibility of addressing the failed unregulated financial world and climate
change at the same time. But when he came to office, he didn't have the courage
to do it. We will not win this battle unless we are willing to talk about why
Obama viewed the fact that he had control over the banks and auto companies as
more of a burden than as an opportunity. He was a prisoner of the system. He
didn't want to change it.

SPIEGEL: The US and China
finally agreed on an initial climate deal in 2014.

Klein: Which is, of
course, a good thing. But anything in the deal that could become painful won't
come into effect until Obama is out of office. Still, what has changed is that
Obama said: "Our citizens are marching. We can't ignore that." The
mass movements are important; they are having an impact. But to push our
leaders to where they need to go, they need to grow even stronger.

SPIEGEL: What should their
goal be?

Klein: Over the past 20
years, the extreme right, the complete freedom of oil companies and the freedom
of the super wealthy 1 percent of society have become the political standard.
We need to shift America's political center from the right fringe back to where
it belongs, the real center.

SPIEGEL: Ms. Klein, that's
nonsense, because it's illusory. You're thinking far too broadly. If you want
to first eliminate capitalism before coming up with a plan to save the climate,
you know yourself that this won't happen.

Klein: Look, if you want
to get depressed, there are plenty of reasons to do so. But you're still wrong,
because the fact is that focusing on supposedly achievable incremental changes
light carbon trading and changing light bulbs has failed miserably. Part of
that is because in most countries, the environmental movement remained elite,
technocratic and supposedly politically neutral for two-and-a-half decades. We
are seeing the result of this today: It has taken us in the wrong direction.
Emissions are rising and climate change is here. Second, in the US, all the
major legal and social transformations of the last 150 years were a consequence
of mass social movements, be they for women, against slavery or for civil
rights. We need this strength again, and quickly, because the cause of climate
change is the political and economic system itself. The approach that you have
is too technocratic and small.

SPIEGEL: If you attempt to
solve a specific problem by overturning the entire societal order, you won't
solve it. That's a utopian fantasy.

Klein: Not if societal
order is the root of the problem. Viewed from another perspective, we're
literally swimming in examples of small solutions: There are green
technologies, local laws, bilateral treaties and CO2 taxation. Why don't we
have all that at a global level?

SPIEGEL: You're saying that
all the small steps -- green technologies and CO2 taxation and the eco-behavior
of individuals -- are meaningless?

Klein: No. We should all
do what we can, of course. But we can't delude ourselves that it's enough. What
I'm saying is that the small steps will remain too small if they don't become a
mass movement. We need an economic and political transformation, one based on
stronger communities, sustainable jobs, greater regulation and a departure from
this obsession with growth. That's the good news. We have a real opportunity to
solve many problems at once.

SPIEGEL: You don't appear
to be counting on the collective reason of politicians and entrepreneurs.

Klein: Because the system
can't think. The system rewards short-term gain, meaning quick profits. Take
Michael Bloomberg, for example ...

SPIEGEL: … the businessman
and former New York City mayor …

Klein: … who understood
the depths of the climate crisis as a politician. As a businessman, however, he
chooses to invest in a fund that specializes in oil and gas assets. If a person
like Bloomberg cannot resist the temptation, then you can assume that the
system's self-preservation capacity isn't that great.

SPIEGEL: A particularly
unsettling chapter in your book is about Richard Branson, CEO of the Virgin
Group.

Klein: Yes. I wouldn't
have expected it.

SPIEGEL: Branson has sought
to portray himself as a man who wants to save the climate. It all started after
an encounter with Al Gore.

Klein: And in 2006, he
pledged at an event hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative that he would
invest $3 billion in research into green technologies. At the time, I thought
it was truly a sensational contribution. I didn't think, oh, you cynical
bastard.

SPIEGEL: But Branson was
really just staging it and only a fraction of that money was ever spent.

Klein: He may well have
been sincere at the time, but yes, only a fraction was spent.

SPIEGEL: Since 2006, Branson
has added 160 new airplanes to his numerous airlines and increased his
emissions by 40 percent.

Klein: Yes.

SPIEGEL: What is there to
learn from this story?

Klein: That we need to
question the symbolism and gestures made by Hollywood stars and the super rich.
We cannot confuse them with a scientifically sound plan to reduce emissions.

SPIEGEL: In America and
Australia, a lot of money is spent on efforts to deny climate change. Why?

Klein: It's different
from Europe. It's an anger that is similar to that held by those who oppose
abortion and gun control. It's not only that they are protecting a way of life
they don't want to change. It's that they understand that climate change
challenges their core anti-government, free-market belief system. So they have
to deny it to protect their very identity. That's why there's this intensity
gap: Liberals want to take a little bit of action on climate protection. But at
the same time, these liberals also have a number of other issues that are
higher on their agenda. But we have to understand that the hardcore
conservative climate change deniers will do everything in their power to
prevent action.

SPIEGEL: With
pseudo-scientific studies and disinformation?

Klein: With all of that,
of course.

SPIEGEL: Does that explain
why you are connecting all of these issues -- the environment, equity, public
health and labor issues -- that are popular on the left? Is it out of purely
strategic considerations?

Klein: The issues are
connected, and we also need to connect them in the debate. There is only one
way that you can win a battle against a small group of people who stand to lose
a lot: You need to start a mass movement that includes all the people who have
a lot to gain. The deniers can only be defeated if you are just as passionate
as them, but also when you are superior in numbers. Because the truth is that
they really are very few.

SPIEGEL: Why don't you
believe that technology has the potential to save us?

Klein: There has been
tremendous progress in the storage of renewable energies, for instance, and in
solar efficiency. But climate change? I, in any case, don't have enough faith
to say, "We'll come up with some invention at some point, so let's just
drop all other efforts." That would be insane.

SPIEGEL: People like Bill
Gates view things differently.

Klein: And I find their
technology fetish naïve. In recent years, we've witnessed some really big
failures where some of the smartest guys in the room screwed up on a massive
scale, be it with the derivatives that triggered the financial crisis or the
oil catastrophe off the coast of New Orleans. Mostly, we as people break things
and we don't know how to fix them afterwards. Right now, it's our planet that
we're breaking.

SPIEGEL: Listening to you,
one might get the impression that the climate crisis is a gender issue.

Klein: Why would you say
that?

SPIEGEL: Bill Gates says we
need to keep moving forward and come up with new inventions to get the problem,
and ultimately our complicated Earth, under control. You on the other hand are
saying: Stop, no, we have to adapt ourselves to this planet and become softer.
The US oil companies are run by men. And you, as a critical woman, are
described as hysterical. It's not an absurd thought, is it?

Klein: No. The entire
industrialization was about power or whether it would be man or nature that
would dominate Earth. It is difficult for some men to admit that we don't have
everything under control; that we have amassed all this CO2 over the centuries
and that Earth is now telling us: Well, you're just a guest in my house.

SPIEGEL: A guest of Mother
Earth?

Klein: That's too cheesy.
But you're still right. The oil industry is a male-dominated world, a lot like
high finance. It's very macho. The American and Australian idea of
"discovering" an endless country and that endless resources can be
extracted is a narrative of domination, one that traditionally casts nature as
a weak, prone woman. And the idea of being in a relationship of interdependence
with the rest of the natural world was seen as weak. That's why it is doubly
difficult for alpha men to concede that they have been wrong.

SPIEGEL: There's one issue
in the book that you seem to steer clear of. Although you revile the companies,
you never say that your readers, who are customers of these companies, are also
culpable. You also remain silent about the price that individual readers will
have to pay for climate protection.

Klein: Oh, I think that
most people would be happy to pay for it. They know that climate protection requires
reasonable behavior: less driving, less flying and less consumption. They would
be happy to use renewable energies if they were offered them.

SPIEGEL: But the idea isn't
big enough, right?

Klein: (laughs) Exactly.
The green movement spent decades educating people that they should compost
their garbage, that they should recycle and that they should ride their bikes.
But look at what has happened to the climate during these decades.

SPIEGEL: Is the lifestyle
you lead climate-friendly?

Klein: Not enough. I
bike, I use transit, I try to give speeches by Skype, I share a hybrid car and
I cut my flying to about one-tenth of what it was before I started this
project. My sin is taking taxis, and since the book came out, I've been flying
too much. But I also don't think that only people who are perfectly green and
live CO2-free should be allowed to talk about this issue. If that were the
case, then nobody would be able to say anything at all.

SPIEGEL: Ms. Klein, we
thank you for this interview.

KLEIN CALLS FOR A
MASSIVE PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT TO CHANGE THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM. IT’S HAPPENING
IN THE UK.

DEMOCRACY, EQUALITY, AND SURVIVAL: A
CALL TO ACTION ON MARCH 28

February 24, 2015 by Marienna Pope-Weidemann

Reading This Changes Everything, I started asking a
lot of new questions. A number of us in the British student movement
campaigning against war and austerity were increasingly perturbed by the lack
of concern about climate change among some of our peers, even though we knew
that extreme weather is displacing more people than war now, and that the
destruction of the planet’s life-support systems would make it impossible for
progressive politics to fulfill its promises. I was frustrated when activists
cautioned: “The welfare of pandas and ice caps is a middle class concern. You
just can’t mobilize around it.” Particularly maddening was a rather bleak sense
that they had a point.

While the British Left may have been on the back foot since
Thatcher, things had reached new lows for us twenty-somethings; we’d grown up
with the relentless, televised War on Terror, and a Great Recession that should
have discredited free-market fundamentalism but instead was being used as a
battering ram to destroy what was left of the British welfare state. We had
been reduced to defending the last of the gains made by our grandparents,
things once taken for granted: universal rights “from the cradle to the grave.”
Climate change seemed like one too many fronts to be fighting on.

My friend Francesca Martinez, the comedian and campaigner, often
complained about this attitude: that there wasn’t any room in the Left’s agenda
and anyway, climate change was too depressing and distant. For her, the problem
was the lack of positive vision in a movement defined by what it opposed;
speaking across the country, she encountered an appetite for an inspiring,
justice-based alternative. And when a friend of mine (now my partner) showed me Naomi’s 2013 speech at the founding convention of the
Canadian union UNIFOR, on why organized labor should join the climate fight,
the implications of her message finally sank in: that this crisis was a
historic opportunity, a planetary demand for system change.

Around the same time, some friends and I were launching a new
project called Brick Lane Debates, to experiment with new ways to get people engaged with
politics. Frustrated with both the passive lectures of the “Old Left” and
horizontal forums too tied down in procedure to get much done, we wanted to
synthesize good organization with meaningful participation. And we didn’t just
want debate, we wanted music, comedy, culture; to build a vibrant, inclusive
community animated by the ideas we thought could change the world.

Our first Brick Lane Debate was about climate change, and
brought together a new constellation of campaigners with a growing group
compelled to action by Naomi’s analysis. We had all joined the People’s Climate
March, which provided beautiful, bold confirmation that youcan mobilise
around the climate. We were particularly inspired by the leading role played by
organized labour in New York—but with honourable exceptions, it was largely
absent in London. Unless we could join the dots between war, austerity, and
climate catastrophe and quit leaving the environment to the environmentalists,
we concluded, we would be giving up the single most powerful case for
democratic system change we will ever see.

That’s the message that is striking a chord with growing numbers
of young people. And that’s how This Changes
Everything UK was born. March
28th will bring hundreds of people together with leading campaigners and
climate scientists for a participatory gathering. At workshops taking
inspiration from the Brick Lane Debates model, we’ll talk about the connections
between the climate and economic crises, share visions for an alternative
future, and discuss how to grow the social movements we need to get us there.
From anti-poverty and environmental organizations like War on Want, Friends of the Earth, and the Young Greens,
to radical campaigns like Fuel Poverty Actionnetwork, Occupy, and the newly launched Join The Dots, people are ready to stand up for all these
ideas, together.

And the time is right, it seems to us, for such a symphony of
radical voices to be heard. In the UK, the historic scale of the People’s
Climate March was just the beginning. Vigorous grassroots campaigns against
fracking have been erupting in sleepy rural communities. And the recent surge
in Green Party membership here reflects not only concern for the climate, but
also deep disillusionment with the narratives being regurgitated by our
political establishment and their megaphones in the mainstream media. Public
trust in government, the press, and the police has never been lower, while
participation in political protest is at an all-time high. Meanwhile, we see
progressive coalitions transforming the political landscape in Greece and
Spain.

Old assumptions about what is impossible or inevitable, or what
people have the capacity to care about, have no place in the new movements that
are emerging. If there was ever a moment to change everything, it’s now.

***

Like us on Facebook and follow @TCEuk on Twitter. We’re still organizing the
format and structure of the March 28th gathering, so if you’d like to get
involved or think your organization could help lead one of our workshops, drop
us an email atthischangeseverything2015@gmail.com.

More details, along with tickets, are available on our website. There is also a page where you can help
raise the funds we need to make it happen!

Marienna Pope-Weidemann is a is a writer, filmmaker, and
campaigner based in London. She was a co-founder of the Student Assembly
Against Austerity and the Brick Lane Debates project, and is currently producing a
documentary series on austerity, alternatives, and resistance. You can follow
her on Twitter at @MariennaPW.

You will enjoy reading chapters 10-11 of This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein
about the significant role indigenous people are playing especially in Canada
in opposition to fossil fuel extraction.
A sample statement: “As the Indigenous rights movement gains strength
globally, huge advances are being made in recognizing the legitimacy of these
claims” (of treaty rights). This is a
significant book. Try the Intro., or go
directly to ch. 10. OMNI’s Climate Book
Forum has already discussed the book and will hold a second session the first
Sunday in May.

I asked Lolly which of
the articles in the 2 Worldwatch anthologies on sustainability she would
recommend as complementary to Klein. She chose the one by Alperovitz. Here is my analysis.

Gar Alperovitz, “The
Political-Economic Foundations of a Sustainable System,” Ch.
18, Governing for Sustainability, The Worldwatch
Institute, State of the World 2014.

Section One:

Alperovitz, like
Klein, asks us to master a new story with a new set of characters and contexts
and vocabulary. Ridding ourselves of US capitalism requires us to give
our minds a thorough wash, after lifetimes of indoctrination favoring an
economic system of self-aggrandizement, and then commit ourselves to the
struggle to replace that pernicious system by one that serves and cares for the
planet and its inhabitants. Here is his central statement: “…getting
serious about sustainability requires focused attention on why public policy
support has, at best, been able to slow but not stop ecological
deterioration. The roots of this challenge lie in the growing
concentration of wealth and income and the consequent self-reinforcing capture
of the machinery of politics to serve private ends.” The rest of the
essay discusses symptoms of this conquest and how we can restore public
ends. Examples of the symptoms, in addition of course to the steady
concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals devoted to
capital accumulation instead of the public good, are: the dispersal
of cities and the destruction of labor unions.

Section Two, “What Does
Justice Require?” summarizes a case against the “enormous inequities of
today” and for more equal societies simply because equality (equity, fairness,
justice) produce a better world (e.g., better health) for all. Here
Alperovitz digs into the conceptual corrosions that prevent us from bonding as
communities and rising up against the system’s wrongs, especially the long,
powerfully funded and organized manipulation of the ideas of “private” and
“public.” Contrary to the constructed wisdom, the glorified “private”
market system is in fact highly subsidized by the public, and the rich are rich
by having grabbed common assets egregiously. Read pp. 194-95 carefully.

Section Three, “Building
an Alternative,” singles out “community wealth building as the place to begin
developing an alternative.” These institutions “—non-profits,
cooperatives, employee-owned institutions, land trusts, community
corporations—“create living-wage jobs, and anchor those jobs in communities.”

Section Four,
“International Developments,” extends the argument and examples globally, to
the worker cooperative movements of Argentina and Mondragon in Spain, and the
consumer cooperatives. Some countries, Italy and Japan for example, have
strong worker and consumer cooperatives.

Section Five, “Next
Steps,” explains ways the people’s economic power can be translated into
political power, how “locally anchored jobs and investment” can become the
national system for a “to build political support for sustained green
transition” and a durable democracy. This will require an enormous struggle
by the people, but we have done it before with FDR’s/Democratic Party’s New
Deal. A key concluding statement: “The ultimate goal of these strategies
is to undermine and eventually replace the destructive ‘grow or die’ imperative
inherent in the current market-driven system.” [See his book: What
Then Must We Do: Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution. 2013.]
[One criticism: Just as the Worldwatch anthologies were flawed by the
absence of essays on US militarism and imperialism—do I remember
correctly? I hope Alperovitz and the Worldwatch editorsis correct in
apparently thinking we can overthrow US capitalism without simultaneously
grappling with the
Pentagon.]

The following 2 items were sent to the following
people 3-31-15: omnicctf and sc, Estes, Barnwell, F Alexander, Coger, Art

Alnoor Ladha and Martin
Kirk of The Ruleswrite in "Capitalism is Just a Story and
Other Dangerous Thoughts" that
our system of neo-liberal capitalism is one story that is told about the way
the world works. In this story, natural resources are turned into commodities
so they can be monetized. As in the feudal age, the wealthy few are taking more
and more, cutting the rest of us off from the treasures we once shared and
expanding the wealth divide so that more of us become 'serfs'. Ladha and Kirk
go on to say, "our only absolute limitation is our collective imagination,
expressed through our will to change the mythologies that hold this house of
cards together." For once we see neo-liberalism and its related
"isms" of colonialism, imperialism and racism for what they are and
what they do, we are closer to being free of their grip and creating a new
story. -more-

Alnoor Ladha and
Martin Kirk of The Rules, "Capitalism is Just a Story and Other
Dangerous Thoughts"

We’ve grown up listening to a story that tells us
we are inadequate, and the only way to be happy is to consume
more and more, faster and faster.

Today,
the propagators of this story, the 1% have reached a point where
they will soon become wealthier than the rest of the 99%
combined. They are pushing our planet to the brink of
destruction while impoverishing billions and destroying
biodiversity.

But it’s just one story on the shelf of the library of ideas. And
we can collectively write a new one. That’s what our latest video
‘Capitalism is Just a Story’ is all about.

Will you help us spread this message of possibility and
alternatives through your communities?

Our inequality video has over half a million views and counting,
and this is because you have been helping us spread these
important counter-narratives. This means that our efforts have
made more people aware of how inequality is actually being created
in the world.

Capitalism is Just a Story is a follow-up. It
exposes the system that is creating and thriving on inequality
today. More importantly, it brings with it the message that we
can change this story.

We can build a better, more equal world by telling
a different story. Let’s expose the old story of greed, scarcity,
domination and unlimited growth that has created inequality and
injustice. And spread the new one about abundance, love and
equality.

THE
CHOICE IS OURSDocumentary SeriesThe Venus Project
invites you to watch Part I & II
of this three-part documentary series

Part I explores the determinants of behavior
to dispel the myth of “human nature” demonstrating that environment shapes
behavior.

Part II illustrates how our social structures
impose our values and behaviors demonstrating that our global monetary system
is obsolete and increasingly insufficient to meet the needs of most people.

Part III, to be released this year, will depict the vision of The
Venus Project to build an entirely new world from the ground up, a “redesign
of the culture” where all enjoy a high standard of living, free of servitude
and debt, while also protecting the environment.

In addition, we have an official website for the film series with further details
about the documentary at:thechoiceisoursmovie.com

ATTEMPTS TO DILUTE OR REFUTE KLEIN
WERE FACED BY MLKJRl: THE SAME DENIAL OF HIS CRITIQUES OF VNWAR/WAR/IMPERIALISM
AND CAPITALISM AND THE POVERTY THEY PRODUCE.

America began perverting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s message in
the spring of 1963. Truthfully, you could put the date just about anywhere
along the earlier timeline of his brief public life, too. But I mark it at the
Birmingham movement's climax, right about when Northern whites needed a more distant,
less personally threatening change-maker to juxtapose with the black rabble
rousers clambering into their own backyards. That's when Time politely dubbed him the "Negroes'
inspirational leader," as Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff point out in
their excellent book Race Beat.

Up until then, King had been eyed as a hasty radical out to push
Southern communities past their breaking point -- which was a far more accurate
understanding of the man's mission. His "Letter from a Birmingham
Jail" is in fact a blunt rejection of letting the establishment set the
terms of social change. "The purpose of our direct-action program is to
create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to
negotiation," he wrote, later adding, "We know through painful
experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be
demanded by the oppressed."

Shame that quotation rarely makes it into the sort of King
remembrances that will mark today's 40th anniversary of his assassination.
Generations after the man's murder, our efforts to look back on his life too
often say more about our own racial fantasies and avoidances than they do about
his much-discussed dream. And they obscure a deeply radical worldview that
remains urgently important to Americans' lives. Today, I don't mourn King's
death so much as I do his abandoned ideas.

We've all got reason to avoid the uncomfortable truths King
shoved in the nation's face. It's a lot easier for African Americans to pine
for his leadership than it is to accept our own responsibility for creating the
radicalized community he urged upon us. And it's more comfortable for white
America to reduce King's goals to an idyllic meeting of little black boys and
little white girls than it is to consider his analysis of how white supremacy
keeps that from becoming reality.

Take, for instance, his point that segregation's purpose wasn't
just to keep blacks out in the streets but to keep poor whites from taking to
them and demanding economic justice. There's a concept that's not likely to
come up in, say, the speech John McCain was rumored to be planning for today.
"The Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim
Crow," King lectured from the Alabama Capitol steps, following the 1965
march on Selma. "And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that
his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that
told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better
than a black man."

It's thoughts like those that made him decidedly less popular at
the time of his death than today. The bloom started to wear off King's media
rose when he turned his attention to Northern racism. The central defense
Southern segregationists offered when thrust on the national stage was that
their Jim Crow was no more of a brute than the North's. King agreed, and in
announcing his organization's move into Chicago, he called the North's urban
ghettos "a system of internal colonialism not unlike the exploitation of
the Congo by Belgium." And he named names, pointing to racist unions as
one of a dozen institutions conspiring to strip-mine black communities. So much
for "inspirational." But then, like now, nobody wanted to hear such
talk -- only the black press paid any attention.

Later, when a white mob hurled bricks and cherry bombs at
marchers in Chicago, King told reporters that the scene outdid anything below
the Mason-Dixon Line. "I have never in my life seen such hate,"
biographer Taylor Branch quotes him as saying. "Not in Mississippi or
Alabama." Today, we hear little about the ideas that experience provoked
for King: His deathbed blueprint for changing America's caste systems included
a three-pronged attack on racism, poverty, and war.

It's that last charge, to fight war-making, that got him in the
most trouble during his time and that gets most readily ignored today. Despite
grenades of criticism from his fellow civil-rights leaders, his erstwhile ally
in the president, and the press, King declared he had no choice but to stand up
against the Vietnam War. But what's striking is the still red-hot relevance of
his reasoning, a perspective also likely to be left out of the dreamy
platitudes delivered on days like today.

King called the armed forces a "cruel manipulation of the
poor" and likened war funding to "some demonic destructive suction
tube," siphoning off resources needed to deal with pressing domestic
issues. And he warned that our zeal for the fight reflected "a far deeper
malady in the American spirit," one which drives us to consider the
protection of our "overseas investments" to be a greater imperative
than the preservation of life. The 1967 speech bears quoting at length:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the
world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.
We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a
person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and
property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets
of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

It's to our detriment that we whitewash all of these valuable
ideas from our national memory of King. But the greatest tragedy may be that
African Americans have morphed his belief in the power of community into a
follow-the-leader obsession. Each King holiday and memorial spawns another
round of "Where's Waldo?" pondering over who our new leader is, or
should be, or if one exists at all.

I suspect King's answer would be who cares? Indeed, while the
rest of the civil-rights establishment cringed when black college students
launched their own, amorphous movement of sit-ins, King applauded it. He called
the student movement "a revolt against Negroes in the middle class who
have indulged themselves in big cars and ranch-style homes rather than joining
a movement for freedom," according to Branch. Today's preoccupation with
naming King's successors seems similarly trivial.

Black America first anointed King its savior after he stormed
onto the national scene in Montgomery, holding together the prolonged 1954 bus
boycott with nightly speeches in which he exhorted everyone to stay the course.
Jet magazine called him "Alabama's Modern Moses." We've been waiting
for another prophet since he was gunned down on April 4, 1968. I just wish our
last one would come back and remind us that our power lies not in leadership
but in a collective refusal to be oppressed. SubscribeGive GiftRenewCurrent Issue